April 28 – 29 2016 – UCL Institute of the Americas

Following the success of our 1st International Conference in 2015, the UCL Americas Research Network invites graduate students and early career researchers working on any aspect of the Americas to participate in our 2nd International Conference: ‘Ideas & Transformations in the Americas’ with keynote speeches by Prof Maxine Molyneux (UCL Institute of the Americas) andProf Diane Negra (University College Dublin).

With important elections coming up across the region in 2015-16 it is essential to pause and consider how ideas can transform the political, economic, social and cultural landscape across the Americas. We welcome papers from international researchers working across the humanities, the social sciences and beyond in order to create a dynamic, interdisciplinary conference that will showcase the depth and quality of emerging research on the Americas.

This includes proposals that explore Central, South and North America and we particularly encourage participation from researchers whose focus is upon Canada and the Caribbean. Whether this is national, regional, local, comparative, transnational, or global we hope to create a hemispherically-diverse conference which will foster interdisciplinary conversations that transcend the boundaries of the nation-state.

We welcome proposals that explore any topic pertaining to the broad theme of the conference, including:

• The interaction of social, cultural, economic and political ideas
• Regional transformation, cooperation, integration and conflict
• International relations and foreign policy
• History, narratives and identity
• Democracy, human rights and security
• Protest, social movements and regime legitimacy
• Urbanization, ecology, communities and agrarian movements
• Gender and feminism

The conference will be free to attend. Please submit abstracts to: uclamericasresearchnetwork@gmail.com by 14 December 2015 and feel free to contact the Network at the same email address for further information.

NOTE: Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words and should be accompanied by a short biographical note. The Network will respond to all potential participants in January 2016 and the deadline for the submission of accepted papers will be March 31 2016.

Call for Papers for the 1^st International Virtual Conference on Cultural Studies on the topic of  “Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies: Sites and Insights” to be held from January 15 – 17, 2016

Registration and Abstract Submission Deadline: September 10, 2015

Full Paper Submission Deadline: October 31, 2015

This virtual conference focuses on collaborative transnational cultural studies and wants to investigate how encounters with the English language and ‘American culture’ have shaped European identities. Sites of these encounters span literary and cultural texts (e.g. novels, short stories, plays, films, TV series), corporate mass culture (e.g. Social Networks, technological products or fashion items) as well as countercultural phenomena (e.g. social movements). ‘America’ in this project is an object of study that functions as a cultural process of translation. The primary research question is to examine how the signifier ‘America’ functions as an intermediary in the production of transnational civic European cultures.

The conference will gather researchers from universities, colleges and companies from all around the globe. The event will connect different cultures and knowledge, thus contributing to the improvement of intercultural communication and research skills.

 For more information, see: http://cultural-studies.chdu.edu.ua

Contact us at: cultural.studies.conference@gmail.com

Selected papers will be published in a conference proceedings.

There is no participation fee.

Heidelberg, Germany, March 14-18, 2016

Call for Papers

The thirteenth HCA Spring Academy on American History, Culture, and Politics will be held from March 14-18, 2016. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one-week conference that provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and discuss their Ph.D. projects.

The HCA Spring Academy will also offer participants the chance to work closely with experts in their respective fields of study. For this purpose, workshops held by visiting scholars will take place during this week.

We encourage applications that range broadly across the arts, humanities, and social sciences and pursue an interdisciplinary approach. Papers can be presented on any subject relating to the study of the United States of America. Possible topics include American identity, issues of ethnicity, gender, transatlantic relations, U.S. domestic and foreign policy, economics, as well as various aspects of American history, literature, religion, geography, law, musicology, and culture.

Participants are requested to prepare a 20-minute presentation of their research project, which will be followed by a 40-minute discussion. Proposals should include a preliminary title and run to no more than 300 words. These will be arranged into ten panel groups.

In addition to cross-disciplinary and international discussions during the panel sessions, the Spring Academy aims at creating a pleasant collegial atmosphere for further scholarly exchange and contact.

Accommodation will be provided by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.

Thanks to a small travel fund, the Spring Academy is able to subsidize travel expenses for participants registered and residing in developing and soft-currency countries. Scholarship applicants will need to document the necessity for financial aid and explain how they plan to cover any potentially remaining expenses. In addition, a letter of recommendation from their doctoral advisor is required.

APPLICATIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED: August 15 ‐ November 15, 2015

SELECTIONS WILL BE MADE BY: January 8, 2016

PLEASE USE OUR ONLINE APPLICATION SYSTEM: www.hca‐springacademy.de

MORE INFORMATION: www.hca.uni‐heidelberg.de

FOR FURTHER QUESTIONS: springacademy@hca.uni‐heidelberg.de

Edited Collection: Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves

Editors

Dr. Susan Flynn, University of the Arts London

Dr. Antonia Mackay, Oxford Brookes University & Goldsmiths, University of London

Call for Chapters

Proposals submission deadline: 1st November 2015

Notification of acceptance: 1st December 2015

Full chapters due: 1st April 2016

Planned submission: June 2016

Introduction

The unique character of our time is increasingly defined as one of surveillance – a period of being watched and policing ourselves and others. Coupled with this, technologies have permeated throughout our lives, both internally and externally, challenging our understanding of privacy, subjectivity and the notion of the individual. Have these developments impacted upon our understanding of geographical and bodily spaces? Has this changed our ability to understand selves, others and what it means to be ‘real’?

The Western world is central to these concerns, foregrounding and championing surveillance technology through Facebook, Google, Apps designed to pinpoint locations, phones which can track your movement; and this accumulation and commercialisation of ‘personal data’, in the wake of a post 9/11 mentality, the gathering of information seems to be pertinent and radically modern influence on our society and culture. Surveillance and technologies take many forms from the relationships between public and private, to the use of art, film, and literature as reflections of sociocultural concern. The aim of this volume is to bring together literary, cultural and artistic studies to provide a multidisciplinary text aimed to generate answers to fundamental questions: how surveillance and technology has changed the literary, the visual and the subjective.

Recommended Topics

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Is there a need for Cultural Studies to address surveillance?
• How does surveillance affect our conceptions of the global West?
• What is the significance of space in creating identity?
• Are there ethical concerns in how surveillance is used in culture?
• How is meaning created in this environment?
• Can artefacts challenge our understanding of technological influence on the body and selfhood?
• Can technologies and surveillance shift notions of nationalism?
• How does the presence of multiple ‘gazes’ affect cultural narrative?

Submission Procedure

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit a 350-500 word chapter proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of their proposed chapter, on or before 1st November 2015. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by 1st December 2015. Full chapters will be requested on or before the 1st April 2016. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project. Please submit proposals as Word documents to both antoniamackay@brookes.ac.uk and susan.flynn.1@ucdconnect.ie using the subject line “Spaces of Surveillance”

Publisher

This edited collection has received initial interest from a number of prominent publishers. Contributors will receive full details and submission guidelines on acceptance of their proposal.

Inquiries

Inquiries may be directed to: antoniamackay@brookes.ac.uk or susan.flynn.1@ucdconnect.ie

International Arthur Miller Centennial Conference

University of Extremadura, Cáceres,

Spain November 19-21, 2015

Deadline for proposals: September 30, 2015

Plenary speakers: Christopher Bigsby (Director of the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies, University of East Anglia, UK, pending confirmation); Matthew Roudané (Georgia State University), Félix Martín Gutiérrez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), and Ramón Espejo Romero (Universidad de Sevilla).

The Department of English of the University of Extremadura (Faculty of Arts and Letters) will host the International Arthur Miller Centennial Conference, in Cáceres, Spain on November 19-21, 2015.

The conference aims to provide a forum for academic reflection into any aspect of the life and works of Arthur Miller. We welcome contributions from a wide spectrum of critical perspectives on the playwright’s prolific output of dramatic and non-dramatic works, spanning more than six decades. From the perspective of the 100th anniversary of his birth on October 17, 1915, Miller’s role in American literature and culture and his significant contribution to the reshaping of American theatre will be reassessed.

This three-day conference will feature 4 plenary lectures, panels of concurrent paper sessions, 2 roundtable sessions, staged readings, and photographic and book exhibits. Themes that could be addressed include, but are not restricted to:

•  Miller’s reception abroad: influence, affinities and translations into other languages.
•  Miller’s literary contemporaries
•  The influence of European theater on Miller’s drama
• The “seductive” influence of Miller’s works on other American and European playwrights
• The lasting legacy of Miller and his connection to and influence on other playwrights
•  Miller as a playwright/short story writer/novelist/essayist
•  The staging and performance of Miller’s plays in Europe
•  The transposition of Miller’s playscripts to the screen
•  Fact and fiction in his plays
•  Miller in Spain and Spain in Miller
•  Intertextuality in Miller
•  Linguistic/stylistic studies of Miller’s plays
•  The intersections of race, class and gender in Miller’s plays
•  Miller’s politics and ideology
•  Teaching Miller: Text, subtext and context

The official conference languages will be English and Spanish. It is anticipated that selected papers from the conference will be published.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250-300 words (in Microsoft Word or rtf formats) for proposed 20-minute papers by September 30, 2015, accompanied by a short biographical note not exceeding 150 words, institutional affiliation, and contact details to all the following emails. Notification of acceptance will be sent by October 7th .

Luis Girón Echevarría, Conference chair (luigiron@unex.es ; luisgironechevarria@gmail.com )

Bernardo Santano Moreno (santano@unex.es)

Mª Carmen Galván Malagón (mcgalvan@unex.es)

Diana Villanueva Romero (dvillanv@unex.es)

For further information, please visit the Conference website (under construction) or contact the organizers: https://internationalarthurmillerconference2015.wordpress

Reading Risk in Contemporary U.S. Fiction and Culture

A Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Colloquium

University of Birmingham, 02/10/2015.

Five days after 9/11, Republican Party activist James Pinkerton proclaimed that ‘the World Trade Center has been destroyed, but this has also been a crushing defeat for irony, cynicism and hipness. Here in New York, the city that gave the world Seinfeld, Sex and the City and Studio 54, the victors now are sincerity, patriotism and earnestness’ (Newsday, September 16th, 2001). Has Pinkerton’s claim come true? If traditional values like sincerity, patriotism and earnestness are ascendant, what space is left for texts that risk to contest or query the status-quo? Should we abhor risk as the cause of the financial crash, or pine for risky artistic practices that might instigate change? Do we need the texts we study to be risky?

We are pleased to announce that on 02/10/2015 the University of Birmingham will invite postgraduates and early career researchers to discuss these and other issues regarding risk, in whatever permutation, in contemporary U.S. fiction and culture. Speakers are invited to give 15 minute papers on topics including, but by no means limited to, the following –

•       Experimentation in contemporary fiction and culture
•       The role of risk in publishing and media development
•       Financial/economic risk in contemporary literature and culture
•       Risk taking, risk management, and neoliberalism
•       Eco-criticism and environmental risk
•       The body, epidemics, health and medicine
•       Humanities research and risky/risk-averse methodologies
•       Being ‘post-’ (theory, postmodernism, ideology, etc.)
•       Precarity and ‘at risk’ populations
•       Technology, surveillance, and pre-emption.

This event will bring together postgraduates and early career researchers working on contemporary U.S. fiction and culture to discuss their work in a welcoming and informal setting. There are no registration fees. Please send a 200 word abstract, along with a 50 word biographical note, to riskinUSfiction@gmail.com by August 20th. For more general queries or clarification, please contact Alexander Moran and Edward Jackson at the same email address.

The Dynamic City: Futures for the Past

25 & 26 March 2016

Boston University

Are preservation, diversity, and affordability mutually exclusive in urban America? How can neighborhood identity and community be preserved while engaging with the opportunities of globalization? What should be saved in attempts to build and maintain a fair and equitable city?  This conference will explore such questions through conversations that bridge the divide between study and praxis in design, sustainability and preservation.  The American and New England Studies Program at Boston University is committed to collaborative scholarship and encourages graduate students in all fields to submit proposals for twenty-minute presentations.  We seek papers that follow an interdisciplinary framework through history, preservation studies, environmental studies, economics, sociology, art and architectural history, visual culture, material culture, ethnic studies, gender studies, literature, film, and other disciplines. Select papers will be published in an edited anthology.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Urban architectural and design history
• Preservation and environmental sustainability
• Gentrification and social sustainability
• Affordable Housing and housing affordability
• Neighborhoods and place making
• Urban planning and political authority
• Cities as biological systems –  foodways, transportation, waste, energy
• Stasis versus development in the preserved landscape
• Public and private interest groups
• Activism and revolt – “NIMBYism”
• The opportunities and challenges of abandonment of people and places
• The rise of post-industrial urban economies
• Gateway cities – doomed to failure or the bright future?
• The politics and legislation of preservation and urban renewal
• Race and gender politics in the urban space
• Urban museums performing the role of historians
• Public space and public memory
• Heritage Tourism
• The immigrant and ethnic landscape

Panels will include presentations from both graduate students and practitioners (architects developers, planners, and public officials) to situate historical narratives within the project of planning and development.

Submission Guidelines

A successful proposal will identify its sources and methodology and will be analytic rather than descriptive.

Deadlines:

• October 15th, 2015 – Abstracts of no more than 300 words and a CV to: P. J. Carlino
• January 1st, 2016 – A full paper draft.
• Successful applicants will be notified by November 15th, 2015.

This event is sponsored by the Graduate Student Association of the American and New England Studies Program,  the Preservation Studies Program at Boston University, the American and New England Studies Program at Boston University, the Boston University Center for the Humanities, Historic New England and the Boston University Initiative on Cities.