Pamphleteering Culture, 1558–1702
Edinburgh
30 September, 2017
Conference Website

This one-day conference, held jointly by the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews, will explore different approaches to early modern pamphleteering. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, it will discuss the literary and historical aspects of pamphleteering. By uniting dedicated scholars of pamphleteering with researchers who use pamphlets as part of a wider project, the conference will create new understandings of the subject. We aim to examine both the construction of a culture of pamphleteering, and the ways in which pamphleteering shaped early modern cultures more broadly.

The conference will include a keynote address by Professor Joad Raymond (Queen Mary University of London).

The organisers are pleased to invite proposals from established scholars, early career researchers, and particularly PhD students for papers of 20 minutes in length. Papers may address pamphlets produced in the British Isles or elsewhere in Europe during any part of the period from 1558 to 1702. We welcome proposals from scholars approaching pamphlets and pamphleteering in relation to subjects including:

• Literary Criticism
• History of the Book
• Politics
• Religion
• Social History
• Cultural History
• Material Culture
• Visual Culture

We are especially interested in proposals regarding the relationship between pamphleteering and popular opinion, or that discuss pamphleteering in connection with other forms of media (e.g. printed, manuscript, or oral). We would also like to hear from scholars whose research challenges conventional narratives surrounding geography, gender, and race within the culture of pamphleteering.

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words, along with a 150-word biography, to pamphleteering2017@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is 30 June, 2017.

AAANZ 2017 Conference: Art and its Directions
The University of Western Australia, Perth
6-8 December 2017

Conference Website

This year’s conference theme Art and its Directions is broadly conceived against the backdrop of debates relating to national sovereignty and globalisation. Rather than purely a focus on politically based art in this context, we turn to the question of directions in art, where directions refer both to geography and chronology. The aim is to investigate artistic production and exchange in relation to the geographical, conceptual and imaginative relationships between north, south, east and west, so as to encompass discussion of transnational and global art histories; and the binaries of centre and periphery, modern and traditional. The theme takes account of the conference location in Western Australia – ranging from perceptions of the west to its distinct collections, and history.

There is also focus upon how art objects and art practices exist in different spatial and temporal contexts. This may include discussion of the mobility of objects and the materials of art, and of curatorial practices relating to the display of works of art.

• Convenors of panel sessions might consider subject areas such as:
• The theorising of geographies in relation to art
• Art and the changing history of place
• Landscapes, travel and the sensory dimension of place
• Heritage, nostalgia and anachronism in art
• Contemporary curatorial practice and its global aspects
• Indigenous art and cultural objects in their original settings and in the museum
• The legacy of colonialism in historical and contemporary art practice
• Emigré and refugee artists, and cross-cultural exchange
• Representations of the cosmos, and the mapping of sea and land in Aboriginal art
• Aboriginal rock art and cross-cultural encounters
• Art and cartography, navigation, travel and trade
• The translocation of art through commercial forces and war
• The mobility of images in the digital age, including the role of photography
• The space of the studio and its relation to the outer world

Session Format

• Conference sessions are timetabled for three 20 minute papers plus 10 minute questions, totalling 90 minutes
• Alternative formats may be proposed, such as round table or open discussions providing that they can be accommodated by the timetable structure
• On Wednesday 6 December there will be a dedicated Postgraduate Day for presentation of papers from current postgraduate students and those who have completed postgraduate study within the last eighteen months. These papers do not need to relate to the conference theme. The call for postgraduate papers will open on 17 June 2017
• Postgraduate students are also eligible to propose conference sessions and papers in other sessions

Submission Process

• Panel session proposals are to include: name and email address of the session convenor(s); institutional affiliation; session title; a brief abstract (of no more than 250 words) that describes the session and how it fits with the conference theme
• Email session proposals to conf@aaanz.info, attention Conference Administrator
• The deadline for session proposals is COB Monday 22 May 2017
• Session convenors are required to be active members of AAANZ at the time of the conference and will be asked to renew or register for membership upon acceptance of their panel proposal
• Session convenors will be notified of the acceptance of their proposed session on or before 13 June 2017
• Call for papers for sessions will open on 17 June 2017
• Session convenors are expected to administer all enquiries and correspondence relating to their session in consultation with the conference committee

Contact

Please address all correspondence to the Conference Administrator, Vyonne Walker, conf@aaanz.info

Website: http://aaanz.info/aaanz-home/conferences/2017-conference/art-and-its-directions-call-for-sessions

‘Shakespeare at Play’
ANZSA 2018
The University of Melbourne
8-10 February, 2018

Conference Website

Confirmed keynotes:

• Gina Bloom, UC Davis
• Claire M. L. Bourne, Penn State U
• Roslyn L. Knutson, U Arkansas, Little Rock

20 minute papers are now invited for the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association (ANZSA) biennial conference. Papers might consider (but are not restricted to) these or any related topics:

• plays
• players
• swordplay
• early modern plays
• Shakespeare in plays
• playfulness
• playwriting
• play on words
• play-based learning
• playing tricks
• playwrights
• playbooks
• playback theatre
• Melbourne: capital of cultural and sporting play
• improvisational play
• getting played
• game-playing
• pop up playground

Inquiries and proposals (200 words + 50 word bio) should be sent to David McInnis (mcinnisd@unimelb.edu.au) by Friday 4 August, 2017.

The Shape of Return: Progress, Process, and Repetition in Medieval Culture
ICI Berlin
29-30 September, 2017

Organized by: Francesco Giusti and Daniel Reeve

Keynote speaker: Elizabeth Eva Leach (University of Oxford)

In his Convivio, Dante claims that ‘the supreme desire of each thing, and the one that is first given to it by nature, is to return to its first cause.’ Yet this formulation is marked by a tension: return is both a destination and a process. To put it in terms of an Augustinian distinction: does each thing simply desire to arrive in/at its patria (homeland, destination, telos), or is its desire also directed towards the via (way, process, journey)? On the one hand, the desire for return is teleological and singular; on the other, it is meandering, self-prolonging, perhaps even non-progressive. And return itself can also be errant, even when successful: to take one important example, medieval theology frequently conceptualizes the sins of heresy and sodomy as self-generating returns to unproductive sites of pleasure or obstinacy.

Return, then, is an uncanny thing, with a distinctive temporality that conjoins recollection, satisfaction, and frustration. It plays an important role in shaping many kinds of medieval cultural artifact. Return is a basic component of pseudo-Dionysian (and later, Thomistic) theories of intellection; for Boethius, it is inherent to the process of spiritual transcendence. Return also shapes literary texts: for instance, romance heroes desire to return to their homeland, but the obstacles placed in their path, or the digressions they undertake, are the basic preconditions of the stories in which they find themselves. In such cases, only a deferred return can satisfy; and even a return is not inevitably satisfying — it can also be a frustrating repetition of a well-trodden path. This is true of lyric texts as much as narrative ones: medieval lyric poems are often concerned with the human inclination to go back to an unfruitful site of pain, loss, or even dangerous enjoyment.

Return is also embedded in the very texture of medieval poetic and musical forms: the sestina, the refrain, and the terza rima all embody different kinds of recursivity. Dante’s re-use of rhyme sounds in the unfolding of the Divine Comedy — a poem that, at various crucial points, thematizes return as a transcendent symbol — performs a spiraling movement that combines repetition and progressive ascent. Reiteration can disrupt linear and teleological progress, but also empower it. How does medieval culture cope with this ambivalence?

The conference will explore the ways in which medieval literary, artistic, musical, philosophical, and theological texts perform, interrogate, and generate value from the complexities of return, with particular reference to its formal and temporal qualities. Reconsidering the practical and theoretical implications of return — a movement in time and space that seems to shape medieval culture in a fundamental sense — we will investigate the following questions:

• What shapes does return take, and how does it shape cultural artifacts of the Middle Ages?
• How does return (as fact or possibility) regulate the flow of time and the experience of human life?
• How can return as a final goal and return as a problematic repetition coexist?
• Is repetition simply identified with a state of sin, or can it lead somewhere?

The conference will provide a forum for an interdisciplinary discussion of medieval temporality: we welcome participants working in any academic discipline. Areas of investigation might include:

• Neoplatonic emanation and return to the self / God; the temporality and shape of religious self-perfection
• Refrain and/or repetition in musical and literary forms such as lyric, lyric collections or narrative verse incorporating refrains or concatenation
• Ulyssean return in romance, theology, hagiography; return as resolution and/or disruption
• The processes of return inherent in the use and experience of literary topoi and loci classici; exegetical return; the tension between innovation and tradition in biblical commentary
• Religious conversion as return: teleology, retrospection, spatial metaphors
• Return as related to medieval conceptions of originality and reproduction
• The experience of return in daily life: liturgy, ritual, diurnal and seasonal cycles, the mechanical clock
• Return in medieval temporal theory: for example, the medieval reception of circular time in Stoic philosophy or the book of Ecclesiastes
• The geometry of return in (for instance) mystical writing
• The queerness and/or conservatism of return
• Return from digression; return as a regulatory mechanism
• Return theorized as a constitutive process of subjectivity and/or intellection
• Return as a psychoanalytic concept related to obsession, repression, Nachträglichkeit

Papers will be given in English, and will be limited to 30 minutes. Please email an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short bio-bibliographical profile (100 words maximum) to theshapeofreturn@ici-berlin.org by 15 April, 2017. An answer will be given before 1 May 2017. A full programme will be published on the ICI Berlin website (www.ici-berlin.org) in due course. As with all events at the ICI Berlin, there is no registration fee. We can provide assistance in securing discounted accommodation for the conference period.

Peace, Empathy and Conciliation Through Music: A Collaboratory
The University of Melbourne
21-22 September, 2017

More info: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/peace-empathy-and-conciliation-through-music-a-collaboratory

Enquiries: Samantha Dieckmann (samantha.dieckmann@unimelb.edu.au)

Organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, The University of Melbourne, in collaboration with the Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts & Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, and Multicultural Arts Victoria, this collaboratory will bring together researchers, practitioners (musicians including performers, community musicians, music educators, music therapists; community development workers; social service workers; arts organisation delegates), and arts and community policymakers to share ideas around the ways that music is used to develop peace, empathy and conciliation. We invite submissions from local, national and international researchers and practitioners, and hope that the symposium will produce thought-provoking discussion and fruitful partnerships between industry, community and education sectors.

Organised around the United Nations International Day of Peace, this collaboratory will include a keynote address by Laura Hassler, founder and director of ‘Musicians Without Borders’.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• The emotional, social, cultural, psychological and/or political mechanisms underlying the use of music in peace building, empathy development and/or conflict transformation.
• The characteristics of effective and ineffective musical practices and programs aimed at peace building, empathy development and/or conflict transformation.
• The ways in which various stakeholders involved in this work engage with one another, and the implications of their collaboration.
• The frameworks within which such music programs and practices are supported, and how these structures affect the work itself.
• The ways in which schools and universities engage with music practices and programs aimed a peace building, empathy development and/or conflict transformation, and the ways this engagement can be improved upon

Accepted presentation formats:

Academic papers (20 mins); fieldwork reports (20 mins); thematic panels of 3-4 speakers (45 mins); workshops (60 mins or 90 mins); poster presentations (A0 size).

Call for Papers

Submission guidelines:

Submissions should include the title of presentation, presentation format, 250-word abstract, and short professional biography of presenter/s (approx. 50 words).

Email submissions as Microsoft Word files to samantha.dieckmann@unimelb.edu.au

Deadline for submissions is 1 June, 2017, and notification of acceptance/rejection provided within two weeks, with instructions on how to register. Deadline for registration is 1 July 2017.

The Performance and Performativity of Violence
An interdisciplinary conference hosted by The Performance of the Real Research Theme
The University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
19-21 June, 2017

Conference Website

Keynotes:

• Professor Bruce Johnson (Macquarie University, Australia and University of Turku, Finland)
• Dr Lisa Fitzpatrick (University of Ulster, Ireland)

While violence has always permeated society, today it is expressed and constructed in an ever-greater variety of ways. Due to globalization and technological advances during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, performative violence now has an unprecedented range and effect. Jeffrey S. Juris argues that where direct political violence is meant to cause death or injury to human beings, performative violence involves ?symbolic ritual enactments of violent interaction with a predominant emphasis on communication and cultural expression? (2005: 415). Thus, protest violence or terrorist acts are often staged in part with an aim to capture media attention (ibid), and may involve further aims such as intimidation and gaining ?compliance from adversaries? (Zech and Kelly 2015: 85). At the same time, the potential for artistically bounded performance to be used in more brutalizing ways, or to depict increasing levels of violence has increased. With this come questions of ethics and spectatorship. The performance and performativity of violence is thus of pressing concern.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to draw together scholars from a wide variety of fields to examine the ethics, politics and nature of representations/orchestrations of violence, as well as what makes the performance and performativity of violence particularly compelling, pervasive and or problematic in the current age.

In addition to conventional paper presentations, we also invite papers on the theme with a performance or creative component.

We encourage papers relating but not limited to the following topics and questions:

• Violence performance and spectatorship
• Performative violence used to serve political or terrorists ends
• Is there an actual cause-effect relationship between performance and violence? Do performances cause violence? Are they an instrument or tool of violence?
• When performance has violent effects, is any form of reparation due to the victims of such violence? If so, who should assume responsibility (users, performers, the creative industries, the mass media)? What are (or should be) the rights of victims of performative assault?
• The performativity of institutional or structural violence
• What are the causes of performance?s violent/pacifying effects? How many of these effects are due to the performance?s volume, to aesthetic considerations, to content etc.?
• Do different people experience violence in relation to performance differently? If so, how and why?
• How effective is performative violence? Does it achieve its desired results? Does it have unintended and perhaps undesirable consequences?
• Performative violence related to:
  • The ethics and politics of representations/stagings
  • Culturally codified or expected performances/behaviours

We welcome abstracts for papers, performances, panels or other presentation formats.

Please submit a 300-word abstract of your presentation and a 150-word biography for each presenter by May 3, 2017. Deadline extend to May 12, 2017. Please send us your abstract as a Word document, and use your surname as the document title. Please clearly indicate the title of your presentation, as well as your full name (first name, surname) and institutional affiliation (if relevant).

Please send your abstracts or any enquiries to the Theme administrator, Massi, at performance.real@otago.ac.nz. There are a few small travel bursaries available for postgrad students coming from overseas. Please contact the theme administrator for details.

The Performance of the Real is a University of Otago funded interdisciplinary Research Theme.

The project is to investigate what it is about representations and performances of the real that make them particularly compelling and pervasive in our current age. At its core is the study of how performance/performativity, in its many cultural, aesthetic, political and social forms and discourses, represents, critiques, stages, and constructs/reconstructs the real, as well as the ethical, social and form-related issues involved in such acts.

EASA Biannual Conference: “Nationalism Old and New: Europe, Australia and Their Others”
Faculty of Letters, Downtown Historical Building of the University of Barcelona, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585
16-18 January, 2018

Organised by the Observatory: Australian Studies Centre for the European Association for Studies of Australia

Europe is uncomfortably enmeshed in what is commonly perceived as a fight for social, political and cultural survival in the face of the increasing international circulation of capital and labour, the postcolonial aftermath of Empire and the growing, transnational impact of climate change; in short, the multifarious expressions of unstoppable globalisation. What started as a pragmatic need to control and eliminate continental conflict and an idealistic intent to preserve the gains of the welfare state in democratic Europe after the Second World War, has, after half a century of attempted and effectual integration, run up against its real and imagined limits. Nationalism is re-instating discrete binaries and closing borders, not only on the outside or intercontinentally, but also on the inside or intracontinentally, and the European Union is seriously questioned as a political and identitarian superstructure. The Brexit campaign’s success is on a par with the regressive character of the recent presidential campaign and election result in the United States, jeopardising the UK’s continued presence in the EU in favour of a tighter Anglo-American projection and affiliation, and questioning the UK’s internal structure. Grexit looms on the horizon of Greece’s financial predicament and threatens to oust the classical cornerstone of European culture; and a xenophobic domino referendum effect affecting wealthy founding members such as France, Italy and The Netherlands is not unlikely at present. These and other tensions revive the ghost of balkanisation and territorial fragmentation.

Xenophobe parties in member states have grown substantially, recreating the fearsome figure of the dangerous Other to close national borders and recalling the contours of a racist past deemed overcome forever. Migratory and refugee flows from the Near-East and Sub-Saharan Africa, generated by postcolonial power vacuums, are the object of harsh and coercive treatment by Europe an and national authorities, with Austria and Hungary having led a barbed-wire approach to the management of cultural difference that recalls the not so distant eugenic past. An acute postcolonial observer and political scientist, the Spain-based Algerian Sami Nair speaks succinctly of European disillusion and disillusionment (El desengano Europeo, Galaxia Gutenberg 2014), while the Denmark-based Indian writer and cultural critic Tabish Khair detects a new European xenophobia in the globalization process, stemming from “international flaws, as shaped by high capitalism, [that] will have to be remedied “globally” through concerted public action and legislation” (The New Xenophobia, OUP 2016: 188).

As a European settler nation in a globalising world, Australia may function as Europe’s antipodean mirror image, given its long track record of imposing an exclusionary identity, discrete essentialist binaries and forbidding borders, which have kept the make-up of its population largely European. The Australian example of asylum policy is not alien to the current European initiative to employ Turkey as a buffer zone against the Middle-Eastern influx, which recalls the Australian refugee policy of mandatory detention in New Guinea and the Pacific island-state of Nauru. Human right groups have called Australia’s asylum seeker policies “an appeal for fear and racism” (ABC News, 28 May 2010), and this is nothing new as the “yellow peril” has been the object of political action ever since Chinese immigrants participated in the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes. The White Australia Policy was paralleled by the nation-state?s mistreatment of the Indigenous population, who were equally excluded from Australian society, politics and history, so that the (mis)management of Australian identity operates both internally and externally, as it does in the European Union nowadays. It is therefore not surprising to see leaders of xenophobic European parties such as the Dutch politician Geert Wilders give their active, full support to like-minded political formations in Australia, which is suggestive of some structural synergies between Europe and Australia in identity matters. In the face of the violence generated by resurfacing racism, national redefinition and the lack of universal citizenship, Etienne Balibar’s call, echoed in Khair’s words above, to “civilize the state” in support of a politics of emancipation and transformation is as valid for Australia as it is for Europe (Politics and the Other Scene, Verso 2002 [Fr.1997]).

Bearing in mind the above context, this conference aims to explore the following questions:

• How do Europe and Australia respond to the growing internationalisation of issues once deemed managable on the national level, be they of an economic, demographic, social, political or climatic kind?
• To what extent is the re/turn to nationalism a credible and viable response to the problems that assail both continents? Are these the product of a common sense or fear?
• What are the structural links between European and Australian policies towards migration, refugees and asylum seekers?
• To what extent do the above issues affect the inequalities of ethnicity, class and gender already existent in both continents? To what extent is religion a factor of division?
• To what extent is European identity a “question mark”, an identity in de/re/construction (Julia Kristeva in Ignacio Vidal-Folch’s interview, El Pais, 3 June 2008), and how does the recent context of fear, racism and intolerance impact on this process?
• Likewise, to what extent is Australianness a postcolonial question mark rather than a neutral marker of identity? What is the place of “New Settlers” and Indigenous peoples in the nation-state?
• What are the connections/disconnections between European and Australian approaches to developing a human rights culture? What is the place of migrant peoples and Indigeneity in future expressions of Europeanness and Australianness? To what extent may/do European and Australian (policies of) identity inform and solicit each other?
• How may discourses of Indigeneity influence notions of Europeanness? To what extent is Europe afraid of being “Aboriginalised”, that is, of suffering the same fate that Indigenous Australians experienced under European colonisation?
• What can the role of Australian Studies be from the perspective of Europe in terms of furthering an understanding of politics of in/tolerance and in/exclusion?

Due to the cross-disciplinary character of this Conference we shall consider papers on topics relating to any branch of Australian and European Studies inasmuch they inform each other and overlap, including History, Literature, Culture, Film Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Media Studies, Architecture, Geography, Spatial Studies, Environment, Political Science, Indigenous Studies, Gender Studies, Gerontology, Linguistics, Translation Studies, Education, Sociology, Art History, Religion, Philosophy. We welcome proposals for papers and panels that address but are not restricted to the following topics:

• Connections and disconnections between European and Australian approaches to developing a human rights culture;
• Problematizing mainstream immigration, refugee and integration policies;
• Diasporic “takes” on Australian and European identity in politics, literature and the visual arts;
• Ghosts of the past: the ideological and material inheritance of Empire and the World Wars.
• The exclusiveness of nationalist communities and arguments;
• Territorial fragmentation and globalisation;
• The analysis of discourses of Indigeneity and new settlement in the European and Australian context and their cross-overs;
• Inherited responsibilities and the moral requirements of belonging;
• Transnational perspectives on Australian and European culture, society and/or history;
• Islam, the “war” on terror and the revival of nationalisms in Europe and Australia.

Please send your 250-word abstracts for 20 minute papers and 100-word bio notes to easa2018bcn@gmail.com by 1 June, 2017.

We do encourage panel proposals, which should be accompanied by a 100-word overall abstract in addition to the 250-word abstracts for a panel’s individual papers. Notification of acceptance/rejection of abstracts will be sent by 1 July 2017.

All accepted participants will be expected to become members of the EASA as a precondition to presenting their papers. Details of EASA membership are available on the association’s website at this address: http://www.easa-australianstudies.net/easa/office.

A call for full-academic-length papers derived from conference presentations will be issued after the conference for publication in the Association’s online journal JEASA (http://www.easa-australianstudies.net/ejournal/call).

A conference website is under construction; full details on registration etc. are to be made public shortly.