Call for Papers: Skin since 1700
Scratching the Surface: The History of Skin, Its Diseases, and Their Treatment
History of Medicine Unit, University of Birmingham (UK), 29-30 October 2010
Proposals due by 30 April 2010
An international conference hosted by the History of Medicine Unit, University of Birmingham, and sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
Skin and skin disease is a central focus of many sub-fields in the history of medicine, including the history of venereal disease, cancer, leprosy, TB and industrial medicine. This conference seeks to address the subject of skin, its diseases and their treatment broadly since 1700. In the process, it aims to bring together individuals working in very different sub-fields in medical and cultural history over the past three centuries. It further aims to promote discussion of the subject in the context of the history of specialisation more generally, as well as the history of senses, sight, smell and touch being central to understandings of skin disease and the way in which such diseases are experienced by practitioners, patients and the public historically. The history of skin ailments also invites exploration of the historical relationship between professional medicine and wider cultural endeavours such as aesthetics, probing realms where health and beauty converge. The conference might similarly offer an opportunity to examine how medical understandings of the skin may have influenced or been influenced by the politics of race.
The organisers wish to invite proposals for 20-30 minute papers on any aspect of the history of skin and its diseases since 1700. Abstracts should be between 200-300 words in length and will be received until 30 April. A programme, featuring a keynote address by Professor Philip Wilson (Penn State, USA), will be advertised in June 2010.
Contact:
Dr Jonathan Reinarz, University of Birmingham, UK (j.reinarz@bham.ac.uk)
Professor Kevin Siena, Trent University, Canada (ksiena@trentu.ca)
Call for Papers: Quakers and Slavery
Quakers and Slavery, 1657-1865: An International Interdisciplinary Conference
Philadelphia, 4-6 November 2010
Proposals due by 30 April 2010
Keynote Speakers: Gary Nash (UCLA), Jerry Frost (Swarthmore), and James Walvin (York)
In 1657, George Fox wrote “To Friends beyond sea, that have Blacks and Indian Slaves” to remind them that Quakers who owned slaves should be merciful and should remember that God “hath made all Nations of one Blood.” His argument may seem far from radical today, but it initiated three centuries of Quaker debate and activism over the problem of slavery that would ultimately see Friends taking key roles in abolition and emancipation movements on both sides of the Atlantic, and beyond. It was, however, by no means inevitable that Quakers would embrace antislavery. In the seventeenth century, and most of the eighteenth century, Quakers were divided on the issue, particularly in the British American colonies, with some denouncing slavery, and others owning slaves. In the following century, Quakers were more unified in their opposition to slavery, but encountered a range of spiritual, political, and personal challenges while taking their antislavery message to a wider world. This interdisciplinary conference aims to examine the history, literature, and culture of the Quaker relationship with slavery, from the society’s origins in the English Civil War up to the end of the American Civil War, with a focus on what David Brion Davis has called “The Quaker Antislavery International.”
We welcome proposals for pre-circulated papers from scholars in all relevant disciplines; in particular, from historians, literary scholars, art historians, and scholars studying Quakers and slavery beyond the English-speaking world. Topics to be discussed may include but are not confined to: (more…)
Call for Papers: CSECS in October
36th Annual CSECS Conference: Charting the 18th Century: Encircling Land & Sea
St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada, 14-16 October 2010
Proposals due by 28 February 2010
Plenary Speakers:
- Isobel Grundy (Professor Emeritus, English & Film Studies, University of Alberta)
- Jean-François Palomino (Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, Montréal)
- Pat Rogers (Distinguished University Professor and DeBartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts, University of South Florida)
The planning committee for the 36th annual CSECS conference welcomes papers on any aspect of the long eighteenth century. Selected papers will be published in Lumen. 2010 marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Sarah Fielding, the Copyright Act, Swift’s Description of a City Shower and the 250th anniversary of the reign of George III, Diderot’s La religieuse, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Voltaire’s Tancrède . . . (more…)
Call for Papers: Graduate Conference on ‘New Formalisms’
Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms (Graduate Student Conference)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 23-24 April 2010
Abstracts due by 10 March 2010
The British Modernities Group, in conjunction with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the departments of English, Philosophy, and Art History, and with support from the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, invites submissions from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and methodological orientations for our annual graduate student conference, this year themed “Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms.”
The conference will open with a keynote address by Marjorie Levinson, professor at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who specializes in the areas of critical theory, and in poetry and poetics. She not only theorizes the rise of the “New Formalist” movement, but enacts these tensions in her own scholarship, including a contribution to a collection of essays entitled Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History in 1989, and a recent publication in Studies in Romanticism entitled “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza.”
New Formalism is a recent trend—a “movement,” according to Marjorie Levinson’s 2007 essay “What is New Formalism?” in the PMLA—in critical theory, cultural studies, and literary scholarship that challenges some of academia’s established methods and critical approaches. The term “New Formalism” seemingly implies a “return” to formal qualities such as genre or aesthetics in approaching literary and cultural studies. New Formalism itself is hardly a unitary concept, hence the plural reference in our title to New Formalisms; the term itself is open to debate and definition. The graduate conference will engage this critical trend by exploring the ways in which New Formalism reflects attentiveness to political and ethical issues. What does a turn or ‘return’ to formalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century mean? How does New Formalism impact disciplinary, pedagogical, or theoretical positions or methodologies? How can form be political? How can form be ethical? (more…)
Call for Papers: Medievalizing Britain
DeBartolo Conference on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies: ‘Medievalizing Britain’
Tampa, Florida, 2 April 2010
Paper proposals due by 5 February 2010
Back by popular demand, the DeBartolo Conference will return in 2010 as a one-day Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference on Medievalizing Britain. Our event will feature a keynote lecture by Professor Antony Harrison, Distinguished Professor of English and Department Head at North Carolina State University. Dr. Harrison is a leading scholar on Christina Rossetti and the author of five books and numerous articles, editions, and reviews on Victorian poetry, culture, and medievalism. In addition, the day’s activities will include single-session panels, a roundtable discussion, a catered lunch, and an evening wine and cheese reception. This event is free to participants, guests, and the public at large. (more…)
Call for Papers: Not Such a Grand Tour after All?
Dirty Sheets: The Underside of the Grand Tour
International conference at the Villa Vigoni in Menaggio, Italy, 26-29 July 2010
Paper proposals due by 1 March 2010
Give what scope you please to your fancy, you will never imagine half the disagreeableness that Italian beds, Italian cooks, Italian post-horses, Italian postilions, and Italian nastiness, offer to an Englishman.
–Sharp, Letters from Italy (1766), p. 43 (letter XI, Rome, October 1765)
Organized by Joseph Imorde (University of Siegen) and Erik Wegerhoff (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich), the conference Dirty Sheets: The Underside of the Grand Tour aims to establish the cultural context of unfavourable travel accounts of Italy from the long eighteenth to the twentieth century. Academic discourse, not to mention popular conception, have long seen Italy as a dazzling destination yearned for by the northern European soul. This conference, however, will address an equally important tradition: disenchantment with and desertion of the Italian ideal. The two-day workshop at the Villa Vigoni will focus on the disillusion with, aversion to and rejection of Italy in travel accounts, diaries and letters, and on historically situating critical or pejorative opinions with regard to the sources in which they appear. We welcome case studies which illustrate these, as well as continuities and changes in the negative perception of Italy. Why do Grand Tourists present themselves as the ‘other’? How is this ‘otherliness’ shaped, formed, created or staged? Where did the preconceptions with which they travelled originate? How did they become conventional? How widely shared are these criteria of evaluation? This conference aims to map the contours of a cultural history of disillusion for Italy.
Please send an abstract (max. 400 words) and a brief CV by 1 March 2010 to both Joseph Imorde (imorde@kunstgeschichte.uni-siegen.de) and Erik Wegerhoff (erik_wegerhoff@yahoo.de). Presentations should be no longer than 30 minutes. Papers may be presented in English, Italian and German. A knowledge of German will be beneficial to those who wish to actively participate in discussion. Travel expenses and accommodation will be reimbursed.
Call for Papers: 2011 Anglo-Italian Conference in York
Third Anglo-Italian Conference on Eighteenth-Century Studies
Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, 12-14 September 2011
Proposals due by 31 December 2010
Following the success of the first two Anglo-Italian Conferences, in York in September 2006 and in Capri, Italy in April 2009 the Italian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies are proud to announce the third in this series of conferences. The focus of the conference will be The Marginal and the Mainstream in Eighteenth-Century Italy and Britain. Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers that deal with the theme essentially in Italy and Britain but also in a wider context. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent by email to: Frank O’Gorman (fog17@btinternet.com) or Lia Guerra (dog@unipv.it). (more…)
Call for Essays: Slavery in the Long Eighteenth Century
Confronting a World of Bondage: Britain, Global Slavery, and the Long Eighteenth Century
Abstracts due by 15 March 2010
Great Britain’s engagement with transatlantic slavery in the long eighteenth century has garnered critical attention from scholars across disciplines, primarily in history and literary studies. Their dominance of the slave trade and the surprisingly successful abolitionist movement places Britain at the nexus of a set of singular social, political, and economic changes, specifically with respect to other European nations. However, as scholars like Nabil Matar and Linda Colley have shown, the idea of enslavement extended beyond West Africa and the New World. The public imagination also responded with fascination to tales of Barbary captivity and enslavement as well as to the ‘exotic’ slaving practices of the Ottoman empire. In addition, conflicts over religion produced tracts that compared Catholicism to a form of enslavement. During the Restoration in particular, pamphlets expressed the fear that Englishmen would become political ‘slaves’ to an absolutist monarch—i.e. French Catholic absolutism would enslave Englishmen in an overdetermined way. Moreover, proto-feminist discourse from writers like Mary Astell depicted the female condition as a form of enslavement. Clearly, the term ‘slavery’ to the eighteenth-century audience encompassed broader physical and metaphysical conditions than current scholarship seems to acknowledge.
Contemporary scholarship has produced useful studies on Atlantic and Mediterranean forms of slavery, illustrating that human bondage was an extremely complicated and varied phenomenon during the long eighteenth century. If the term ‘slavery’ is associated in modern minds with the racialized institutions of plantation slavery in the Americas, it is clear that conceptions of slavery from the Restoration to the organized abolitionist movements against West African slavery encompassed a much larger domain, in both a literal and figurative sense. Moreover, audiences in Britain could and did often formulate competing ideas of slavery that allowed them to simultaneously view African slavery as a necessary evil, consider Mediterranean slavery as an atrocity, and invoke metaphorical slavery to inveigh against the current socio-political state. What new meanings can be discovered by bringing these multiple understandings of the term into conversation? How can we complicate ideas of bondage in an era that introduced new concepts of freedom and progress and knit it into a complex national narrative? (more…)
Call for Papers: Conference on Women and Political Thought
Women’s Political Thought in Europe 1700-1800
Prato, Italy, 25-29 August 2010
Proposals due by 8 March 2010
Offers of papers are invited for a conference on the contribution of women to the history of political thought in Europe during the Enlightenment period. Papers may discuss the political ideas of individual women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine Macaulay, Mary Hays, Sarah Churchill, Mary Delariviere Manley, Marie Jodin, Emilie du Châtelet, Madame Dupin, Olympe de Gouges, Felicité Keralio-Robert, Madame Roland, Germaine de Staël, Dorothea Erxleben Leporin, Amalie Holst, Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Luise Gottsched, Mariana von Ziegler, Elise Reimarus, Elisabetta Caminer Turra, and others. Papers placing the work of such women in the broader context of political writing by men are encouraged. ‘Political thought’ is broadly interpreted to include sexual politics as well as political theory, and discussions of the political ideas of women as expressed in genres other than the political treatise are welcome.
Submissions of title and one-page abstract should be sent by 8th March 2010, to Karen.green@arts.monash.edu.au, or in hard copy to Karen Green, School of Philosophy and Bioethics, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia.
Up to five bursaries of up to $500 will be available to help post-graduates and early career researchers to attend the conference. Applicants who wish to be considered for one of these should indicate this with their submission.
An edited volume on women’s political thought in Europe during the eighteenth century is proposed, and contributions to the conference may be submitted for publication in this volume. Contributors who are unable to attend the Prato Conference but would like to contribute a paper to the volume are invited to submit papers for consideration by September 30th 2010.
SAH: Call for Session Proposals for 2011 Conference
Society of Architectural Historians 2011 Annual Meeting
New Orleans, 13-17 April 2011
Session Proposals due by 4 January 2010
Members of the SAH, representatives of affiliated societies, and other scholars who wish to chair a session at the 2011 annual meeting are asked to submit proposals by January 4, 2010, to Professor Abigail A. Van Slyck, General Chair of the SAH 64th Annual Meeting (Dayton Professor of Art History, Connecticut College, Box 5565, 270 Mohegan Avenue, New London, CT 06320-4196, aavan@conncoll.edu).
As SAH membership is required to present research at the annual meeting, non-members who wish to chair a session or deliver a paper will be required to join the Society and to pre-register for the meeting in September 2010. SAH will offer a limited number of travel fellowships (with a value of up to $1000) for speakers participating in the annual meeting; session chairs are not eligible for these awards. The deadline for applying will be in October 2010. (more…)
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