Enfilade

Bluestockings: The Social Network
Swansea University, 3-4 June 2011

Proposals due by 14 March 2011

This colloquium is the first in a series initiated by an AHRC-funded network whose purpose is to set in motion a project to edit Elizabeth Montagu’s letters. The c. 8,000 letters of the ‘Queen of the Bluestockings’ (1718-1800) have been described by Barbara Schnorrenberg as “among the most important surviving collections from the eighteenth century.” The Steering Committee comprises Caroline Franklin (Swansea), Elizabeth Eger (King’s, London), Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes), and Michael Franklin (Swansea) and our ultimate aim is a complete critical edition in electronic format, providing unparalleled access to these documents.

Our colloquium Bluestockings: The Social Network will be held on 3-4 June 2011 at Swansea University and the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, featuring keynote lectures by Professor Betty Schellenberg and Professor Felicity Nussbaum. In attempting to diversify and extend our own network, we invite the contributions of editors and scholars working on aspects of bluestocking culture from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including history, literature, classics, politics, economics, linguistics, art, architecture and women’s studies. Possible themes and topics might include: the chief salonnières and their correspondents and how this interchange effected, in the words of David Hume, “the increase of arts, pleasures, and social commerce”; the distinctions between friendship, patronage and love; the role of letters in bridging distances. Consideration of the mixture of informality, intimacy and rivalry which characterized these overlapping networks of conversation, correspondence, criticism, and patronage will undoubtedly further the social and intellectual progress of our own twenty-first-century network. We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers. Please send abstracts of approximately 200 words to both Caroline Franklin c.franklin@swansea.ac.uk and Elizabeth Eger elizabeth.eger@kcl.ac.uk by 14 March 2011.

Though primarily a literary conference, organizers are interested in interdisciplinary work that addresses issues of architecture, urban space, &c. From the conference website:

Literary London 2011: Representations of London in Literature, An Interdisciplinary Conference
The Institute of English Studies, University of London, 20-22 July 2011

Proposals due by 31 March 2011

Organised by the University of Northampton, Kingston University, London, and the Institute of English Studies, University of London

The 10th Annual Literary London conference will be hosted by the Institute of English Studies, University of London. The Institute is located in Bloomsbury, at the centre of literary London, and just a few minutes’ walk from such attractions as the British Library, the British Museum, and the clubs, pubs, and restaurants of Soho. It is at the heart of London: one of the world’s major cities with a long and rich literary tradition reflecting both its diversity and its significance as a cultural and commercial centre. Literary London 2011 aims to:

• Read literary and dramatic texts in their historical and social context and in relation to theoretical approaches to the study of the metropolis.
• Investigate the changing cultural and historical geography of London.
• Consider the social, political, and spiritual fears, hopes, and perceptions that have inspired representations of London.
• Trace different traditions of representing London and examine how the pluralism of London society is reflected in London literature.
• Celebrate the contribution London and Londoners have made to English literature and drama.

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers which consider any period or genre of literature about, set in, inspired by, or alluding to central and suburban London and its environs, from the city’s roots in pre-Roman times to its imagined futures. While the main focus of the conference will be on literary texts, we actively encourage interdisciplinary contributions relating film, architecture, geography, theories of urban space, etc., to literary representations of London. Papers from postgraduate students are particularly welcome for consideration. While papers on all areas of literary London are welcomed, the conference theme in 2011 is ‘Green London’. Topics that might be addressed are: (more…)

Enslavement: Colonial Appropriations, Apparitions, Remembrances, 1750-Present Day
University of Portsmouth, Centre for Studies in Literature Annual Postgraduate Symposium, 17 June 2011

Proposals due by 25 February 2011

Keynote Speaker: Professor James Walvin

Harold Bloom, in his critical introduction to Enslavement and Emancipation (2010) does not, as one might expect, lament the monstrous history of the slave trade. Instead, he returns to the second book of Tanakh (Exodus): an original tale of bondage and liberation. For Bloom, it is not merely a matter of re-imagining a theme now largely associated with the transatlantic slave trade, but moreover to consider how ‘[l]iberation movements to come will go on
finding their model in it’. The Hebrews’ bondage in Egypt, here conceptualized as archetypal suffering and liberation, resonates for Bloom throughout history, leaving its trace in subsequent emancipation movements. Recent studies in the slave trade, too, often move beyond the historical moment to consider how cultural events are remembered, appropriated and disseminated. This work has garnered interest in Britain since the bicentenary of abolition in 2007; the issue of remembrance remains somewhat political and contentious in the US today.

This symposium aims to consider the wider connotations of the term ‘enslavement’ as well as its more specific importance in critical studies of slavery, memory and cultural return. We welcome papers that consider ideas of colonial appropriation; fiscal, somatic, or agricultural enslavement and / or indenture in literature from 1750 to the present day. Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

• Slave Trade Literature
• Economies of Colonial Exploitation / Fiscal Enslavement
• Postcolonial Theory
• ‘Hauntology’ / Memory Theory and Slavery
• Psychological Enslavement
• Hegelian Master / Slave Dialectics

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers. Please send abstracts of approximately 250 words to Lucy Ball and Jane Ford: cslpgconf@port.ac.uk.

2011 International Conference on Arts, Ideas, and the Baroque: ‘Deadly Sins’
The Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, McGill University, Montréal, 24-26 June 2011

Proposals due by 5 February 2011

This conference seeks to examine the ‘baroque’ in the early modern world as well as its echoes and resonances across time. Defined differently by different academic traditions, the notion of the baroque remains a point of reference as well as contention, and a signifier of cultural legacy as well as innovation – as in the notion of the ‘neo-baroque’. We propose to investigate the rich artefacts, representations, and influence of the era—particularly around the theme of Deadly Sins (also the theme of the 2011 Montréal Baroque Festival to be held in conjunction with this conference). We invite papers which address interdisciplinary scholarship and make new connections between research fields. Proposals from scholars working in all disciplines might address, but are not limited to, the following fields:

• Musicology and Music Performance
• Law and Legal History
• Social and Cultural History
• Literature
• Architecture and Design
• Theatre and Performance
• Art History
• Religious Studies
• History of Science and Medicine
• Philosophy

Proposals for complete panels as well as for individual papers in English or French are welcome. Researchers are invited to submit abstracts of no more than 250 words, and brief (2 page) cvs to: baroque@mcgill.ca. Deadline for submissions: 5 February 2011.

IPLAI is a new undertaking by McGill University’s Faculties of Arts, Education, Law, Management and Religious Studies and the Schools of Architecture and Music.  Its goals are to foster collaborative, interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching in the humanities, to reinvigorate the place of humanities scholarship in public discourse, and to examine the life of ideas across time. The Montreal Baroque Festival is a unique festival celebrating the creativity, expressiveness and inspiration of music-making in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The chapels, crypts, chateaux, cafes, cellars, attics, gardens and streets of Old Montreal are brought to life with operas, oratorios, recitals, improvisations and jam sessions performed by an international roster of brilliant musicians.

Conference Registration Fee: $60 (faculty); $25 (students)
Online registration will open March 2011
www.mcgill.ca/iplai/ |  www.montrealbaroque.com

Edited Collection — Libidinal Lives: Economies of Desire in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstracts due by 1 April 2011

In his controversial work Libidinal Economy (1974) Jean-Franҫois Lyotard famously remarked ‘every political economy is libidinal’. With this radical pronouncement, Lyotard identified all hegemonic structures as susceptible to the affective ebb and flow of desire. Forming the cornerstone of the new ‘libidinal materialism’, Libidinal Economy, alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), saw the desiring body as inextricably bound up with economic, political and fiscal operations. In the decades that followed, a wealth of theoretical work drew on this challenging juxtaposition of the libidinal and the economic. Notably, Lawrence Birkens’s Consuming Desire (1988) postulated a parallel development of sexology and political economy and more recently Regenia Gagnier’s The Insatiability of Human Wants (2000) elaborated on the question of production and reproduction in Victorian Aesthetics.

Building on this important and often contentious body of scholarship, this collection of essays seeks to explore the interrelatedness of desire, sexuality and economic processes in the literary, scientific and cultural worlds of the long nineteenth century. Papers might consider the role of libidinal impulses in social and political formations, or question whether desire functions as a cohesive, communal force. They might examine a spectrum of nineteenth-century debates with reference to how they position sexuality as the central and influencing practice in an ideological matrix. In addition they might consider whether we find an undercurrent of competing desires in the patterns of pleasure, production, reproduction and consumption during the nineteenth century, and ask to what extent these desires influenced twentieth and twenty-first century perceptions of the Victorians.

Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Production, consumption, creativity and libidinal impulses
• Sexual/textual lives
• Commodity/bodily fetishism and pornography
• Political/social bodies of desire
• Gift theory and eroticism
• Non-‘normative’ libidinal economies of sensation and pleasure: masturbation, fellation, same-sex intimacy
• The gothic, cannibalism, the death drive and desire
• Imperialist desires and ‘other’ economies
• Colonial and post-colonial legacies and heritage
• Theoretical afterlives, ie., Jean-Franҫois Lyotard, Bataille, Deleuze & Guattari, Eagleton, and
• Queer Theory etc.

Please send abstracts of 500 words (for chapters of 6,000-8,000 words) along with a CV to Jane Ford and Kim Edwards Keates to jane.ford@port.ac.uk and kim.edwards@liverpool.ac.uk by 1st April 2011. The deadline for completed essays is 1st October 2011. Any queries are welcomed.

Geographies of Collections
Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers
Royal Geographical Society and Imperial College in London, 31 August — 2 September 2011

Proposals due by 11 February 2011

Collections of diverse types provide rich sources for geographical enquiry. The specific systems of organisation developed within them, along with their contexts of use, can variously form or inform the geographical imagination. The collection is also never static, whether it is aggregated as an archive, a library, a museum collection, a scientific dataset or a twenty-first century digital database. As a result, the knowledges and geographies developed within them are always ripe for re-imagination.

The theme of the 2011 RGS-IBG Conference, The Geographical Imagination, presents an opportunity to adopt what Rebecca Duclos has termed ‘a cultural geography perspective’ towards collections, and to reconsider their geographies at a time of intensified interest in this area. Popular events such as A History of the World in 100 Objects and the British Library Growing Knowledge exhibition show, from opposite sides of the spectrum, how interaction with myriad different collections is changing. This session therefore seeks to question how geographers working within this shifting landscape are engaging with the collection across a range of forms and materialities.

We would be pleased to receive submissions for papers from researchers engaged in a wide variety of ‘collections’ including fine art, natural history, cartographic, photographic, ethnographic, archaeological, and digital. We are particularly interested in papers which address the issues of place, space and imagination in the accumulation and deployment of collections, and in papers which have a historico-geographical focus. Topics might include: (more…)

Seventh Annual Art History Symposium: The Real & The Fake
California State University, Sacramento, 16 April 2011

Proposals due by 25 January 2011

Keynote speaker: Erkki Huhtamo (Professor of Media History and Theory at the University of California Los Angeles). Huhtamo has lectured worldwide and published extensively on media archaeology and the media arts. His new book on the history of the moving panorama and the diorama, Illusions in Motion: A Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.

The Real & the Fake, the theme of the 2011 symposium, is inspired in part by the concurrent new media exhibition, The Aesthetics of the Fake, which will be on view in the University Library Gallery from March 31 to June 4, 2011. While the exhibition looks at contemporary artists’ use of virtual 3D computer graphics for avant-garde purposes, the art history symposium seeks a wider range of papers that would position this fundamental dialectic of art in any time, place, and culture and in a variety of artistic media. Among the many topics that would make an exciting day-long conversation on this theme are Renaissance scientific perspective/illusionism; Realism and social truths; alternative and subjective realities of Magic Realism, Surrealism, and abstraction; truths and paradoxes of avant-gardes; the problematics of optical illusion/mimesis; tradition, authenticity and tourist art; commercial animation, advertising, Second Life, and hyperreality. Non-Western, comparative, and transcultural considerations are welcome, as are papers on architecture. Please send a 300-word proposal for a 25-minute lecture and a one-paragraph professional biography as an email attachment to Elaine O’Brien, eobrien@csus.edu.

Midwest Conference on British Studies 57th Annual Meeting
Indiana State University, Terre Haute, 4-6 November 2011

Proposals due by 15 April 2011

The Midwest Conference on British Studies is proud to announce that its fifty-seventh annual meeting will be hosted by Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana. The MWCBS seeks papers from scholars in all fields of British Studies, broadly defined to include those who study England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Britain’s empire. We welcome scholars from the broad spectrum of disciplines, including but not limited to history, literature, political science, gender studies and art history. Proposals for complete sessions are preferred, although proposals for individual papers will be considered. Especially welcome are roundtables and panels that:

• offer cross-disciplinary perspectives on topics in British Studies
• discuss collaborative or innovative learning techniques in the British Studies classroom
• situate the arts, letters, and sciences in a British cultural context
• examine representations of British and imperial/Commonwealth national identities
• consider Anglo-American relations, past and present
• examine new trends in British Studies
• assess a major work or body of work by a scholar

The MWCBS welcomes papers presented by advanced graduate students and will award the Walter L. Arnstein Prize at its plenary luncheon for the best graduate student paper(s) given at the conference. (more…)