Monuments

25 – 27 April 2019 in Bergen, Norway

The Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association of American Studies

Submission deadline: 15 Sept. 2018

Monuments construct the past in the present, and link it to a predetermined version of the future. Monuments tell singular and unified stories, acting as master narratives that impede other voices. Monuments have become some of America’s most important storytellers, giving form to power, but also to particular acts of resistance.

This is perhaps only to be expected, for the word “monument” bears within it the Latin mon, from monēre, which means “to remind,” but also means “to warn.” In its descriptive form “monumental” connotes something massive or imposing, something great in importance, but also expresses a sense of excess, of being overwhelmed. The word itself thus invites a chain of questions: What do monuments call to memory? What might they warn us against? What versions of events do they impose in presenting greatness? Who and what deserves recognition? How can monuments commemorate different or competing pasts? What should be done with monuments that uplift violent pasts?

The NAAS 2019 conference in Bergen on “Monuments” welcomes panel and paper proposals that address monuments and the monumental in relation to American literature, history, politics, media, art and popular culture, transnational and transcultural and comparative approaches. Keeping in mind that not all monuments are made of stone—Hemingway has been called a monument, political symbols and landscapes act as monuments, the literary canon and the Bible are monuments to Western culture—the list of different kinds of monuments is near endless. Some themes may be, but are not limited to:

• Conceptualizations of the American past
• Preservation and commemoration
• Tradition and cultural heritage
• Cultural perceptions, shifting attitudes towards the monument
• Representation Memory and forgetting
• Genre or aesthetic form
• Naming
• Landscapes, places and spaces
• Myth
• Resistance to the monument
• Inscription
• The non-monumental
• False memories
• Amnesia
• Nostalgia
• Imaginaries
• Ossification
• War
• Architecture
• Photography
• Religion
• Visibility/invisibility

Please send abstracts and panel proposals to NAASBergen@gmail.com by 15 Sept. 2018. Abstracts for individual panel presentations (20 minutes) should be no longer than 250 words; proposals for panels or workshops should be no longer than 500 words. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out in October.

The conference is open to scholars and students from all countries, but we offer lower registration fees to members of NAAS (Nordic Association for American Studies), EAAS (European Association for American Studies), and ASA (American Studies Association in the U.S.).

A conference website will be made available in the autumn. If you have any questions regarding the conference or your proposal before then, please write to the conference organizers at: NAASBergen@gmail.com.

Conference organizers:

Jena Habegger-Conti, Associate Professor

Western Norway University of Applied Sciences

President, American Studies Association of Norway

Asbjørn Grønstad, Professor

University of Bergen

Vice-President, American Studies Association of Norway

Lene Johannessen, Professor

University of Bergen

Committee Chair, American Studies Association of Norway

Modernist Legacies and Futures:

Modernist Studies Ireland inaugural conference

Friday 17^th May 2019

National University of Ireland Galway

Plenary Speaker: Dr Ben Levitas, Goldsmiths University of London

In many ways, Modernism’s future is now. We are still grappling with modernism’s aftermath, afterlives, and its perpetual relevance. The new textualities and ephemera available to scholars today make it increasingly important to reconsider how creative figures conceived and constructed their future both within their work and in the material cultures they occupied.

The increasing digitisation of cultural materials is reshaping how we interact and understand modernist practice. Archives, newspapers, periodicals, and digital critical editions are allowing scholars to read, see, or listen to the cultural atmospheres of modernity, whilst reading texts anew with digital analysis technologies. Modernism was a movement marked by a dynamic play with concepts of time and temporality. This forged both a sense of periodicity and a moment of crisis in expressing the present and perceiving the future. The study of plural, reterritorialised modernisms and the growing body of available materials opens up new avenues for understanding how and why modernism came into being through artists, publishers, academics, and institutions. The corpus of modernist studies is expanding rapidly and this expansion includes materials that we also create. The aesthetic politics of neomodernism and protomodernism continues to pose questions regarding the remaking and influence modernist practice has today.

The inaugural conference of Modernist Studies Ireland, ‘Modernist Legacies and Futures’ seeks to bring together Irish and international scholars to initiate an exchange and review of current research, trends, and findings in modernist studies. We ask scholars to consider how modernists created or negated the future in their work? Did modernist artists conceive of the future as a prerequisite of the work itself and, if so, how did they attempt to secure their legacy? What does the digital landscape achieve for modernism studies? What future does modernist studies have? If modernism was a radical attempt to reshape culture and art did it succeed and how can we as scholars perpetuate this radicalism? Do current attempts to democratise the study of literature and unsettle canonicity impact future research? What modernisms are missing from the field of modernist study? What does modernism mean to minority languages, cultures, and to a non-western canon?

We invite contributions for 20-minute papers on themes such as, but not limited to:

• Modernist aesthetics and futurity
• Time and temporality
• Age, ageing, and youth
• Vision and revision
• Collaborative acts and interdisciplinary practice
• Modernist editing and the legacy of ‘the work’
• Periodical and print networks
• Minor’ literatures or non-Anglophone modernisms Modernism in the digital humanities
• Gendered and queer modernisms
• Metamodernism and neomodernism
• Historicising or geo-politicising modernisms and modernities
• Space and representation
• Modernism in and of media
• Transnational and global modernisms
• Modernist afterlives and futures
• Modernist (im-)possibilities, utopias, dystopias
• Pedagogy and modernist studies
• Archives, databases, and digital collections
• Editing and publishing histories
• Canon formation and redefinition

Deadline for abstract submission: 5pm, Feb 28^th 2019

For further information please contact: modstudiesireland@gmail.com

Modernist Studies Ireland (MSI) is a new organisation that aims to facilitate the sharing of interests, research, and pedagogical approaches to modernism and modernity in the Republic and Northern Ireland. Modernist Studies Ireland provides a network to communicate our new research, publications, and archival holdings to a local and global audience.

Further information on the initiative can be found here: https://worksinprogressnuig.wordpress.com/

Twitter: @Mod_Ireland

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/modernistireland/

Guilty Pleasures 2

From Poldark to Partridge: masculinity and contemporary television

The second in our “Guilty Pleasures” conference series at Ulster University again sets out to examine the appeal, politics and impact of the television programmes we all love to watch but feel guilty about consuming: the popular, mainstream shows which are addictive yet not “highbrow”, enjoyable but not always intellectually demanding. This year’s event will be held at the Belfast Campus at Ulster University on Friday the 9th November, and focuses on the representation of masculinity on the small screen. From Poldark‘s confrontation with the politics of consent, to Love Island‘s showcasing of male insecurity about the body beautiful, contemporary television engages with all of the issues associated with being a man in the 21st century.

We are looking for papers which will discuss the ways in which contemporary television reflects, makes sense of, or even shapes, our current ideas and anxieties about the male gender.

Proposals for 20 min papers may include but are not limited to:

• “Toxic” masculinity on screen
• Masculinity in period drama
• Men and social class
• Fatherhood and/or domesticity on television
• The television detective and/or criminal
• Family (re)constructions in soap opera
• Gender identity in reality television
• The body beautiful on screen
• Post-Trump masculinities
• The politics of consent
• Fluid and reworked masculinities

Please send abstracts of about 300 words and a brief bio to the conference organisers Ned and Kate at: k.byrne@ulster.ac.uk or nl.young@ulster.ac.uk by the 3rd of September  2018.

Metaphoric Stammers and Embodied Speakers: Expanding the Borders of Dysfluency Studies

Humanities Institute

University College Dublin

12 October, 2018

Keynote speaker: Chris Eagle, Emory University, Centre for the Study of Human Health (Dysfluencies: On Speech Disorders in Modern Literature, 2014; Talking Normal: Literature, Speech Disorders, and Disability, ed. 2013)

The conference will explore the embodied experience and cultural construction of stammering from the collaborative perspectives of literary/cultural analysis, speech therapy and neurological research. The aim of the conference is to develop an interface between literary, cultural and clinical practice in the area of speech ‘disorders’, generating new forms of communication and exchange across these fields.

Despite the centrality of literary/cultural studies to the emergence of Dysfluency Studies (Marc Shell, Stutter 2005; Chris Eagle Dysfluencies 2014), the 2017 Oxford Dysfluency Conference had no humanities-based papers. This conference addresses this imbalance, bringing cultural analysis into genuine exchange with scientific and therapeutic practice, and necessarily negotiating the tension between a medically-inflected model of ‘recovery’ and an emergent challenge to cultural constructions of ‘normal’ speech. Dysfluency is explored less as a ‘disorder’ to be treated, than a form of communication that highlights the intricate relationship between speaking and being heard, vocal agency and cultural reception.

Literary culture has provided a rich and complex store of information about how stammering has been represented and interpreted at different historical junctures, within diverse cultural contexts and in relation to the variables of gender, class and ethnicity. The stammer has also been harnessed as a metaphor for how literary language works, how it operates at the limits of its expressive resources, occupying a territory that circles the paradoxical power of the ineffable. Recent work in the humanities, however, has signalled the need to balance such metaphorical readings with a sense of the corporeal experience of dysfluency, what Jay Dolmage has called ‘the embodied struggle for expression’ (Disability Rhetoric 2014). This renewed focus on embodiment invites diverse, interdisciplinary approaches that serve to accentuate the embodied experience of stammering in its neurological, therapeutic and cultural forms.

This conference is generously supported by the Humanities Institute, UCD College of Arts and Humanities, and UCD Seed Funding Scheme.

Proposals are welcomed for twenty-minute papers in (but not limited to) the following areas:

Normative Speech and Varieties of Expression: cultural constructions of ‘normal’ speech and the representation of ‘counter voices’ of dysfluency.

Rethinking ‘Recovery’: innovations in therapeutic practice (e.g., Narrative Therapy, Non-Avoidance Therapy, Covert/Interiorised Stammering Therapy).

Mapping the Brain: neurological perspectives, auditory feedback, and ‘circuits’ of communication.

Gender and Dysfluency: gendered experience and its reception/representation.

Guide for submissions:

All submissions should include name and email address, a 250-word abstract, a short biography (with academic/professional affiliation, if applicable). Proposals for individual papers or panels of 3 papers are welcomed. Panels that include presenters with a range of affiliations, career experiences and disciplinary homes are encouraged.

All proposals should be submitted as Word document.

Deadline for submissions: Thursday 12 July 2018.

Organiser: Dr Maria Stuart, School of English, Drama, Film and Creative Writing, UCD.

For submission of proposals and general enquiries, please contact: maria.stuart@ucd.ie.