Category: Conferences

CFP: Recovering May Alcott Nieriker’s Life and Work

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Recovering May Alcott Nieriker’s Life and Work | A One Day Conference. June 28, 2018, Université Paris Diderot

https://mayalcottnieriker.com/

Keynote Speaker | Dr Daniel Shealy (UNC, Charlotte)

Call for Papers | Deadline 31st January 2018

May Alcott Nieriker was a nineteenth-century American painter who lived as a single woman in Paris between the years of 1870-1879. At a time when women were not admitted to the beaux arts and were forced to pay double in tuition at the private ateliers, May daringly travelled alone to pursue a career at the age of thirty. She made a great impact on the Parisian art scene: being exhibited at the Paris Salon twice (1877, 1879), and publishing a book, Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply (Roberts Brothers 1879), providing practical advice for other young American women who wished to pursue careers in painting in Europe. Beyond Paris, her career began with a book of sketches of the homes of famous authors from her hometown of Concord, Massachusetts (Concord Sketches, 1869), and she also lived for a short period in London—being exhibited at the Dudley Museum (1877), where she was also allegedly hailed by Ruskin as ‘the only artist worthy to copy Turner’.

However, May continues to remain in the shadow of her more famous sister, Louisa May Alcott, and, as Judy Bullington has observed, her life and achievements are consistently ‘enmeshed’ with the fictional character of Amy March of Little Women (‘Inscriptions of Identity,’ 2007). Recovering May Alcott Nieriker’s Life and Work is a one-day conference, opportunely held in Paris, that aims to gather new interest for, and invite new perspectives on, any aspect of the life and work of this forgotten transatlantic artist, a painter and a writer and a figure of the troubled Parisian scene of the 1870s. Of particular interest are the new contexts of reception of her oeuvre, both her painting and her writing, new archival work, the question of co-authorship (notably with her sister Louisa) and creditation, the mapping of (transatlantic and European) artistic networks in the 1870s.

The symposium will feature the work of postgraduate students of the AHRC CHASE consortium. It is open to academics, independent researchers and international postgraduates from a variety of disciplines: Americanists, nineteenth-century historians, biographers, literary scholars, art historians and artists with an interest in the Alcott family from across the world.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

  • May Alcott Nieriker’s visual art, especially her portrayal of enslaved and freed people in such works as La Négresse (1879) and the lost portrait, “The Prince of Timbuctoo” (1877)
  • The political dimension of her art in the context of French and international politics.
  •  May Alcott Nieriker’s epistolary output and life-writing, housed at the Houghton Library, Harvard, her articles for the Boston Evening Transcript and Youth Companion, and her unfinished novel, An Artist’s Holiday (1873), co-authored with Louisa May Alcott.
  • The importance of Studying Art Abroad: And How To Do It Cheaply (1879) (notably in shaping our understanding of the lifestyle and challenges facing nineteenth-century woman artists, especially those who were expatriates)
  • Mapping May Alcott Nieriker’s Paris.
  • May Alcott Nieriker and her contemporaries (artistic networks, expatriate networks, influence of, and on her peers)
  • May Alcott Nieriker’s life: relationship with her husband Ernst Nieriker, her attempts to combine an artistic career with domestic life.
  • May Alcott Nieriker’s influence on Louisa May Alcott’s portrayal of female artists in such works as A Marble Woman (1865), the Little Women trilogy (1868-1886), Psyche’s Art (1868), An Old Fashioned Girl (1869), and Diana and Persis (1879).
  • May Alcott Nieriker’s relationships with the wider Alcott family: her father Bronson Alcott and mother, Abigail May, and her three sisters, Anna Bronson, Louisa May and Elizabeth Sewall.
  • May Alcott Nieriker’s reception from biographers and critics, and her portrayal in popular culture and fiction, including works such as Jeanine Atkins’ 2015 novel, Little Woman in Blue, and Elise Hooper’s 2017 novel, The Other Alcott.

Scientific committee: Azelina Flint (University of East Anglia), Cleo Humphreys (University of East Anglia), Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Diderot-LARCA), Christopher Timms (University of Essex), Heather McKnight (University of Sussex), Elise Hooper, author of The Other Alcott (2017)

This conference is sponsored by the University of East Anglia, the Université Paris Diderot, the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE), the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the University of Essex and EKCCHO

French Association for American Studies Graduate Student Symposium 2018 – University of Nice, May 22, 2018

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‌Association Française d’Etudes Américaines (AFEA) / French Association for American Studies
Graduate Student Symposium 2018 – University of Nice, May 22, 2018
Call for Presentations

The French Association for American Studies invites doctoral students in American studies to take part in the Graduate Symposium (“Doctoriales”) specifically organized on their behalf during its annual conference. This year’s workshops will be held on Tuesday, May 22, 2018 (9am-5pm) at the University of Nice (France). The conference will take place on May 23 to 25, 2018. For further information, please check our website: http://www.afea.fr

Since 2008, the AFEA has been encouraging the internationalization of its Graduate Student Symposium by offering grants (up to 500 euros each) for a maximum of ten European candidates (other than French) to help cover their travel expenses. All students are, in addition, invited to attend the whole conference free of registration charges. As part of its partnership with the AFEA, the United States Embassy provides funding for one doctoral student coming from an American university.

The symposium provides an opportunity for PhD students to present their research in a less formal setting than that of a full conference panel, and confront it to that of other European scholars. Doctoral students may be at an early or more advanced stage of their research. The proposals will be responded to by professors specializing in related fields. Candidates are invited to give their presentations in English within one of the two workshops offered: 1) American literature, or 2) American “civilization” (history, sociology, political science…). Proposals relevant to both fields (film studies, visual arts or music, for instance), or to another field (such as translation studies or linguistics) can be sent to either of the co-chairs.

Applications
Candidates must send a Curriculum Vitae and a 500-word abstract summarizing their dissertation proposal, plus an estimated budget of traveling expenses and funding otherwise available to them. They must mention when they began their PhD, and the name and affiliation of their advisor.

– Proposals in civilization studies must be sent electronically to both Professor Françoise Coste (coste.francoise@gmail.com) and Professor Romain Huret (Romain.Huret@ehess.fr).
– Proposals in literary studies must be sent electronically to both Professors Mathieu Duplay (mduplay@club-internet.fr) and Anne Ullmo (anneullmo1@gmail.com).

Deadline for application : February 15, 2018. The symposium organizers will respond to all applicants by March 15, 2018.

Professors Françoise Coste, Mathieu Duplay, Romain Huret, Anne Ullmo.

CFP: Madness, Mental Illness and Mind Doctors in 20th and 21st Century Pop Culture

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Madness, Mental Illness and Mind Doctors in 20th and 21st Century Pop Culture

3rd & 4th May 2018

University of Edinburgh

www.madnessinpopculture.com

CALL FOR PAPERS

“Sometimes it’s only madness that makes us what we are.” Grant Morrison, Batman: Arkham Asylum (1989)

In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault writes that “madness fascinates man”. Indeed, examples of this dark allure are present throughout the ages. From tales of those who paid a penny on Sundays to view the insane held at London’s Bethlem Hospital in the early nineteenth century, to ever popular portrayals of mental illness and madness in the literature, television, and film of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, representations of psychiatric illness remain loaded, highly visible, and deeply entrenched in Western pop culture.

Mental illness – and more colloquially, madness – often functions metaphorically as representative of a subversive liminality that delegitimizes protest against the status quo. Characters like John Givings in Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road, for example, are ultimately neutralized as political agents through psychiatric diagnosis. Other more recent filmic and televisual representations of mental illness utilize such psychiatric tropes in alternative but highly recognizable ways. Television shows such as Sherlock and House emphasize the connection between madness and genius, while Fight Club and the television series Mr Robot focus on the social equation between mental illness and criminality. The American true crime podcast Sword and Scale has been accused of demonising victims of mental illness. In Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon, Allie Brosh’s webcomic Hyperbole and a Half, and Kabi Nagata’s manga My Lesbian Experiences with Loneliness, the line between pathology and pathography, medicine and memoir, has blurred.

This conference will examine these representations, and explore the ways in which madness, mental illness, and those who are both affected by, and striving to treat, psychological maladies are depicted in twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture. We ask: how have fluctuating historical conditions and attitudes influenced the ways in which madness and mental illness are portrayed in the media? What kind of relationship exists between medical understandings of psychological disorders and popular depictions of such illnesses? Do contemporary portrayals of “madness” in popular fictions work to demystify and destigmatize mental illness, or do these representations reinforce negative stereotypes, further obfuscating our understanding of psychological disorders?

We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations from a range of disciplines that engage with popular conceptions of madness and mental illness in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Proposals that include visual arts or other media, as well as the traditional paper, are welcomed. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Depictions of mental illness in film, television, literature, podcasts,  graphic novels, and video games.
  • Madness as political/protest (social conformity as ‘true’ madness)
  • Women/gender and madness
  • Madness and creativity
  • Pop culture vs. medical establishment
  • Psychiatry in popular culture
  • Madness and horror/the Gothic
  • Madness, confinement, and physical space
  • Asylums, community care, and deinstitutionalization
  • Madness as metaphor
  • History of psychiatry and antipsychiatry
  • Freud and the history of popularization of psychoanalysis
  • Post-war psychiatry
  • The politics/impact/importance of life narratives
  • The “myth” of mental illness
  • Medical humanities and medical science
  • Mental health and contemporary politics
  • Madness and confessional narrative

Please submit abstracts of 300 words, along with a short biographical note (150 words), to madnessinpopculture@gmail.com by 2nd February 2018. Further information at www.madnessinpopculture.com.

Follow us on Twitter @madpopculture or Facebook, under “Madness in Pop Culture PG Conference”.

CFP: Transoceanic American Studies

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CFP: Transoceanic American Studies

by Benjamin Fagan

Transoceanic American Studies

May 17-18, 2018

Conference at the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC

Conveners: Juliane Braun (University of Bonn/GHI Washington); Benjamin Fagan (Auburn University/GHI Washington)

“Transoceanic American Studies” seeks to bring together scholars working in Atlantic, Pacific, and Transoceanic Studies in order to develop a set of practices and principles for exploring the interconnectedness of the Americas to the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and of those oceans to one another. Such a transoceanic approach brings together two major strains of American Studies scholarship. Scholars have explored the multiple ways in which the United States shaped and was shaped by happenings in and across the Atlantic Ocean, while recent has also focused on the influence of transpacific networks on the United States. Work connecting the United States to happenings in either the Atlantic or Pacific worlds has decisively upended the vision of an American nation isolated from its neighbors by two oceans, but Atlantic and Pacific studies remain largely separate endeavors. Bringing together the insights of scholars working in these fields, “Transoceanic American Studies” will stimulate conversations exploring how events in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds influenced one another.

 

In addition to hosting a conversation between scholars working at the intersections of Atlantic and Pacific Studies, this conference will explore the particular methodological underpinnings and opportunities of a transoceanic approach by considering some of the following questions:

 

What are the key differences between Atlantic Studies and Pacific Studies approaches? What are the key similarities between Atlantic Studies and Pacific Studies approaches? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches? How might we combine Atlantic Studies and Pacific Studies approaches into a transoceanic methodology? What are the benefits, and the potential costs, of such a combination? What are the primary topics or subjects that would especially benefit from a transoceanic approach (i.e. the China trade, the slave trade, the overlap of the East and West Indian Companies)?

 

We invite papers showcasing a transoceanic approach to American Studies, as well as work explicitly interested in the methods of transoceanic studies. The conference will be conducted in English, and the organizers expect to be able to cover the transportation and accommodation costs of conference participants.

 

The deadline for proposals is December 15, 2017. Please send a short abstract of your proposed contribution (no more than 500 words) together with a brief academic CV in a single PDF file to Susanne Fabricius at fabricius@ghi-dc.org If you have questions concerning the conference, please contact Benjamin Fagan at fagan@auburn.edu.

CFP: “Where’s Nora?” Reclaiming the Irish Girl’s Presence in New England literature

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“Where’s Nora?” Reclaiming the Irish Girl’s Presence in New England literature

Call for papers

 

“Where’s Nora?” Reclaiming the Irish Girl’s Presence in New England literature
A panel organized by Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Diderot) and Stephanie Palmer (Nottingham Trent University) and sponsored by the Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Society for submission to the Transatlantic Women 3: Women of the Green Atlantic Conference at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, Ireland, June 21-22, 2018.

Taking the title of one of Sarah Orne Jewett’s story as its tagline, this panel starts with a simple constatation: in nineteenth century New England literature, Nora, Bridget, Erin and other Irish girls were an ubiquitous presence. They popped in and out of New England sketches— from Louisa May Alcott’s “Work” (1873) to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s “The Tenth of January” (1868) to Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A Little Captive Maid” (1893) or “Elleneen” (1901). And yet, ubiquitous as she is, the Irish girl is also conspicuously absent in major scholarly studies of New England literature. If “Bridget” or “Peggy” has received much-needed attention from historians and is central to discussions of diasporic identity in recent studies of Irish-American history and culture (Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, 2006; The Irish Bridget, Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 2009, among others), she has remained a shadow in literary studies. Paradoxically so.

For more than two decades, following the pathbreaking work of Judith Fetterley, June Howard, Marjorie Pryse, Susan Gillman, Sandra Zagarell, and more recently Patrick Gleason and Rebecca Walsh, questions of gender, race, and empire have redesigned the approaches to American letters, and the corpus of New England women’s literature in particular. As a “problem,” the Irish girl sits at the center of questions of political and poetical representation, of transactions of gender, race and class. But where’s Nora in our readings of New England women writers? Nourishing nativist fears and religious anxieties while being also praised as “a valuable element in the new race” (Margaret Fuller, “The Irish Character,” 1845), the Irish girl, whose propensity to serve was both an asset and a liability to her becoming American, proved a challenge to the mystique of American democracy and a symptom of its colonialist penchants. Racialized, minoritized as an unfortunate victim of a belated feudalism, she was a foil to the “mistress”‘s femininity, a threat to the household’s racial homogeneity, and a constant challenge to domestic government. She was also key to a forbidden imaginery, that of Catholicism, of the illicit realm of poetry (Harriet Prescott Spofford, The Servant Girl Question, 1881). It is high time to acknowledge her stubborn, disquieting, and terribly appealing, presence.

This panel argues that the Irish girl is part of the shadows that matter in American literature. Papers may inquire into:

– reading well-known or lesser known texts by New England women writers from the perspective of the Irish girl, however marginal a character she may seem to be. (Catharine Beecher, Lydia Sigourney, Louisa May Alcott, Louise Imogen Guiney, Rose Terry Cooke, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett….)
– Tracing the presence of the Irish girl as a problem, or a question, across genres (essays, poems, domestic manuals, political pamphlets, labor novels, diaries, travel narratives, but also vaudeville, plays, caricatures…); the Irish girl in New England periodicals (Boston Transcript, The Atlantic Monthly…).
– “Avenging Bridget”: contemporary subversive rewritings of the stereotype; giving back a voice, a gaze, to the absentee (Aife Murray, Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language, 2010; Nuala O’Connor, Miss Emily, 2015; Maeve Brennan’s The Rose Garden, 2001…)

Leah Blatt Glasser (Mount Holyoke College) will chair the panel.

Please send 300-word abstracts for papers and a short bio to Cécile Roudeau and Stephanie Palmer at cecile.roudeau@gmail.com and stephanie.palmer@ntu.ac.uk by November 27. The conference abstract deadline is December 1, 2017.

CFP: British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies – What Happens Now Conference

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The BACLS Biennial Conference

The inaugural British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies – What Happens Now Conference (BACLS-WHN) is on 10th-12th July 2018 at Loughborough University, UK.

We invite contributions to the first official BACLS ‘What Happens Now’ conference.
Understanding the contemporary as a fluid and hybrid ‘moment’, contemporary literary studies explores works of culture and their relation to the emerging political and social formations of the present.

We welcome contributions on topics from across the field of contemporary literary studies, including modern languages, comparative and world literatures, eco-criticism, postcolonial studies, translation studies, linguistics, performance studies, media theory, comics studies, video games studies, adaptation studies, the study of popular music, cultural studies, critical theory, and digital humanities.

BACLS-WHN will include readings and performances, as well as three themed conference strands (below). If you are submitting to one of these strands please make it clear in your proposal.

  1. Gendered Lives In honour of our host institution’s work with the Gendered Lives Research Group we welcome panel proposals that bring together those researching gender, how it is experienced, and how it is represented in personal documents and cultural objects in contemporary culture.
  2. Pedagogy Because of the challenges of teaching the contemporary, BACLS-WHN will have sessions devoted to pedagogy and issues of teaching. If you would like to propose to run a workshop on pedagogy or linked issues, or if you have any suggestions of workshops you would like to attend, please email bacls.whn@gmail.com
  3. Professional Development BACLS-WHN will have sessions devoted to PGR and ECR perspectives on the field and the academic profession more broadly. If you would like to propose to run a workshop on professional development, or if you have any suggestions of workshops you would like to attend as a PGR/ECR academic, please email bacls.whn@gmail.com

BACLS is especially concerned to encourage and enhance representation and participation from minorities, and is proactively working to reduce physical, social, and economic barriers to participation and to develop an environment rooted in a belief of equal respect for all. We strongly encourage and will give preference to panels that reflect the diversity of our field in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and institutional affiliation. All-male panel proposals will not be accepted.

Loughborough accessibility statement:
All scheduled events will take place in Martin Hall, which is full accessible. For evening meals, all venues will be chosen with accessibility in mind. Please let the organisers know in advance if you need help with any travel arrangements between the main campus and where the evening events will take place in town. Loughborough is a big campus. If you are staying in campus accommodation, please let the organisers know if you need travel arrangements between the accommodation and Martin Hall.

Please send panel proposals of no more than 600 words, and paper abstracts of no more than 250 words, with brief biographical notes (about 50 words) in word format to the conference email address, bacls.whn@gmail.com by 31st January 2018.

To attend BACLS-WHN you will need to register as a member of BACLS. You do not need to be a member to submit a panel, paper, or workshop proposal.

Conference Organisers: Jennifer Cooke (Loughborough University), Zara Dinnen (University of Birmingham).

CFP: American Politics Group of the Political Studies Association Annual Conference 2018

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American Politics Group of the Political Studies Association Annual Conference 2018

Call for Papers

The forty-fourth annual conference of the American Politics Group of the Political Studies Association will be held at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford from Thursday 4 to Saturday 6 January 2018. The keynote speaker will be Professor Marc J. Hetherington (Vanderbilt University) http://www.vanderbilt.edu/political-science/bio/marc-hetherington

There is a broad conference theme: “The US Constitutional and Political Order: Challenges and Constraints”. This can be approached in various ways, and we will also be happy to receive proposals considering subjects and material beyond this particular theme. For example, papers or panel proposals examining contemporary US political institutions or processes, foreign policy issues or political history are invited. The conference organizers would also welcome papers addressing comparative themes or relevant theoretical or methodological issues. Proposals (no more than 150 words for single papers, 300 words for panels) should be sent to Dr Clodagh Harrington (cmharrington@dmu.ac.uk) by no later than 20 October 2017.

The APG is the leading scholarly association for the study of US politics in the UK and also has members in continental Europe and the USA. Further details about the group and its activities can be found on the APG website (http://www.american-politics-group-uk.net).

Full details of the conference will also be posted on the website. In the meantime any enquiries should be directed to Clodagh Harrington.

Dr Clodagh Harrington

Chair of the American Politics Group

(cmharrington@dmu.ac.uk)

CFP: Transatlantic Women 3: Women of the Green Atlantic

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Transatlantic Women 3:

Women of the Green Atlantic

 

Dublin, Ireland

Royal Irish Academy

21-22 June 2018

 

Sponsored by the Catherine Maria Sedgwick Society and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society

“Since every wind that blows brings to our shores a fresh swarm of these people, who are to form so potent an element in our future national character, it behooves us to study them well, and make the best we can of them.”

Catharine Sedgwick, “The Little Mendicants” (1846)

 

The third meeting of Transatlantic Women will take place in Dublin, Ireland, on 21-22 June 2018 at the Royal Irish Academy. It will focus on Irish/American crosscurrents of the long nineteenth century, on the transatlantic stream of writers, reformers, and immigrants crossing over the Green Atlantic who were engaged in refuting but also perpetuating stereotypes and racist beliefs that troubled Irish-American relations. Such authors as Catharine Sedgwick, for instance, wrestled with contradictory conceptions created of Irish immigrants who appear in many of her writings, including “Irish Girl” (1842) and “The Post Office: An Irish Story” (1843).  In a different context, “An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women” (1852) pointedly addressed American women as the “sisters” of women from both Great Britain and Ireland; although Harriet Beecher Stowe never traveled to Ireland, she met deputations from that country during her first visit to Europe (1853). In “What Is a Home?” (1864) and “Servants” (1865), she expressed concerns about the Irish in the United States similar to those of Sedgwick.

 

This transatlantic gathering will celebrate, and question, nineteenth-century women who crossed the Green Atlantic, wrote about it, or in other ways connected the United States with Ireland through networks, translations, transatlantic fame, or influence. As Peter D. O’Neill and David Lloyd demonstrate in The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (2009), people from Ireland, as well as from Africa and the United States, crossed the Atlantic as slaves and servants, as cultural and political exiles or activists. Many women, active in travel writing, pamphleteering, writing fiction, newspaper articles, speeches, fairy tales, and ghost stories, were promoters of women’s rights and the figure of the New Woman, and were engaged in philanthropy, temperance, abolitionism, social commentary—and simply just in sightseeing and enjoying themselves. Among the most prominent figures to build bridges between the United States and Ireland around activism are such well-known Americans as Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony (on the Irish Question), Frances Willard, Ellen Craft, Ida B. Wells, and the Irish Frances Power Cobbe; among those who have received less attention are, for example, the African American Sarah Parker Remond and the poet Frances Osgood. And the exchange went both ways: fiction by Irish writer Maria Edgeworth, for instance, influenced Sedgwick, among others.

 

The Transatlantic Women 3 conference brings together scholars representing various countries and disciplines to examine the ways in which these women and their ideas moved, how they resisted oppression and created new ways to conceptualize their identities and the reality surrounding them. We welcome presentations on any topic related to nineteenth-century transatlantic women but are especially interested in those dealing with women of the Irish-American nexus. Some of the key concepts include race, stereotypes, assimilation, immigrant reality; conceptualization of space, distance, and identity; movement, and memory—historical and personal.

 

Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • recovering voices of Irish-Americans, or American-Irish women
  • struggles of immigrant women
  • women pioneers, in professions, activism, innovation
  • female networks and sisterhoods—of writers, journalists, travelers
  • women activists (abolitionism, anti-lynching, temperance, women’s rights, peace, white slavery, reform, animal rights)
  • women travelers and their descriptive gaze
  • fictional and realistic descriptions of places, people, and societies
  • women’s articulations of transatlanticism and the Green Atlantic

Abstracts, which should be about 250 words, and a short bio, are due by 1 November 2017. They should be emailed to transatlanticwomen3@gmail.com.

We look forward to yet another stimulating transatlantic conversation with you!

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact any of the organizers:

Beth L. Lueck (lueckb@uww.edu ), Sirpa Salenius (sirpa.salenius@uef.fi ), or Lucinda Damon-Bach (ldamonbach@salemstate.edu).

 

 

CFP: Single Lives: 200 Years of Independent Women in Literature & Popular Culture

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Single Lives: 200 Years of Independent Women in Literature & Popular Culture

University College Dublin, 13-14 October 2017

 

Proposal Deadline: 1 April 2017, midnight Dublin time.

Notifications by 1 May 2017

This conference will explore the last 200 years of literature and popular media by, about, and for single women in relation to aesthetics and form, race, sexuality, class, space, reproduction and the family, political movements, and labor.

Independent women —singly blessed, new, surplus, or adrift— have remained a center around which anxieties and excitement coalesce. A range of historians, demographers, and literary scholars have focused on the social and political significance of diverse single women in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. Moving between the family home and domestic independence, between household and public labor, and between chastity and a range of sexual relations, the single woman remains a literary and cultural focus.

In recent years, especially in relation to UK and US elections, there has been an explosion of popular interest in contemporary singleness. Rebecca Traister’s Big Girls Don’t Cry and All the Single Ladies, comedian Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance, Eric Klinenberg’s Going Solo, the Washington Post’s “Solo-ish” column, as well as the work of psychologist and single-rights activist Bella DePaulo, author of Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored but Still Live Happily Ever After, all explore what it means to be a socially, politically, and sexually active single person in the 21st century. News outlets, film, television, and a host of social and marketing media have demonstrated that people are fascinated by the changing status of singles.

Singleness Studies has emerged as an academic field over the last two decades but has rarely had its own forum for collaboration and exchange. This conference will bring together multiple disciplinary perspectives to uncover the social, political, economic, and cultural connections between the “singly blessed” women and “bachelor girls” of the 19th and early-20th century and “all the single ladies” of the contemporary moment. We seek proposals that analyze single lives within or across this time frame, from disciplines including literature, media studies, history, geography, sociology, architecture, political science, and more. Papers and full panels that create new perspectives by crossing boundaries and integrating multiple disciplines are especially welcome.

 

Keynote Speaker: Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister is the author of the best-selling All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, a New York Times Notable Book of 2016. Traister, a National Magazine Award finalist and winner of the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, is writer-at-large for New York Magazine, where she covers politics, media and culture from a feminist perspective. She has also written for The New Republic, Salon, Elle, The Nation, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her book Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and the winner of the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. She lives in New York City.

Possible topics include

  • Representation of singles in literature
  • Representation of singles in film, television, and other digital media
  • Narrative form
  • Space and architecture
  • Demographic change
  • Reproductive rights and family structures
  • Reproduction and temporality
  • Independent women’s labor and political work
  • “Women adrift” and crisis narratives
  • Singleness and race, class, or identity politics
  • Queer singleness
  • Familiar Figures: bachelor girls, spinsters, new women, and single ladies
  • The single and the state
  • Singleness and literary or media genre
  • Conservative and radical independence
  • Singleness in Trump’s America
  • Single activism
  • Comparative singleness
  • Singleness and disability

Scholars from all disciplines are encouraged to apply.

 

Full Panel Proposals: Panel coordinators should submit a 200-word rationale for the panel as whole. For each contributor, please submit a 250-word abstract, a short bio, and contact information. Panels
that include diverse panelists with a range of affiliations, career experiences, and disciplinary homes are strongly encouraged. Panels should include 4 papers. Submissions can be emailed as a Word document to singlelives2017@gmail.com.
Individual Papers: Individuals submitting paper proposals should provide an abstract of 250 words, a short bio, and contact information. Submissions can be emailed as a Word document to: singlelives2017@gmail.com.

 

Conference Statement:  We hope to host a diverse, welcoming, open first Single Lives conference. We understand diversity to include attendees as well as academic subject, approach, and field. We welcome comparative projects, though because of its smaller scale, this conference will be conducted in English.
Please direct all questions about the conference and the submission process to: singlelives2017@gmail.com
For up to date conference details, see our website: https://singlelives2017.wordpress.com/

Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Single-Lives-2017-Conference-1262119710546609/

Follow us on Twitter: @SingleLives2017

Conference Organizers:

Kate Fama

Jorie Lagerwey

School of English, Drama, and Film

University College Dublin

 

Conference Sponsors

College of Arts and Humanities, University College Dublin

Humanities Institute, University College Dublin

Hybrid Republicanism: Italy and American Art, 1840-1918

Posted on by Jennifer Daly

Hybrid Republicanism:  Italy and American Art, 1840-1918 is an international conference that will consider the shared notions of republicanism and tyranny that animated American and Italian politics and visual culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The program will take into account significant historical events that linked Italy and the United States, such as the Italian wars of independence, the American Civil War, the founding of the Italian nation with Rome as its capital, the rise and decline of progressive reform in Italy and the United States, and Italian and American participation in World War I.  The event will take place on October 6-7, 2016 and is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the American Academy in Rome, and the Centro Studi Americani, Rome with assistance from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, American Embassy in Rome, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Università di Macerata, Purchase College, the State University of New York, and Kenyon College.    A sister conference, “The Course of Empire:  American Fascination with Classical and Renaissance Italy, 1760-1970,” will occur at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC on October 20-21, 2017.

Keynote Address and Reception:  October 6, 2016, 6:00pm-8:30pm at the Centro Studi Americani, Palazzo Mattei, Rome.

Don H. Doyle, McCausland Professor of History, University of South Carolina, and Director of ARENA, the Association for Research on Ethnicity and Nationalisms in America, “The Republican Experiment:  America, Italy, and the Perils of Self-Government”

Conference Schedule:  October 7, 2016, 9:30am-1:00pm, 2:30pm-6:00pm, at the American Academy in Rome, Via Angelo Masina 5, Rome.

 All events are free and open to the public. For entry to the AAR, please show ID; no backpacks allowed.

Speakers:

Daniele Fiorentino, Professor of U. S. History, Department of Political Science, Università degli Studi Roma Tre and conference co-organizer, Welcome and Introductions

Leonardo Buonomo, Professor of American Literature, Department of Humanities, Università degli Studi di Trieste, “Past Glories, Present Miseries:  Reading Italy through Art in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home”

Melissa Dabakis, Professor and Chair of Art History, Kenyon College and conference co-organizer, “Thomas Nast, Garibaldi, and I Mille:   The Making of an Icon in the American Press”

Paul Kaplan, Professor of Art History, Purchase College, State University of New York and conference co-organizer, “Monuments to Tyranny:  Issues of Race and Power in Nineteenth-Century Responses to Italian Public Sculpture”

Adam M. Thomas, Curator of American Art, Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, “Racial Hybridity and National Prophecy in Elihu Vedder’s The Cumean Sibyl”

Adrienne Baxter Bell, Associate Professor of Art History, Marymount Manhattan College, “A Reluctant Revolutionary:  Elihu Vedder in the Circle of the Macchiaioli”

Marina Camboni, Professor Emerita of American Literature and Honorary President, Center for Italian American Studies, Università di Macerata, “American Artists and Enrico Nencioni’s Role as Mediator, Interpreter, and Translator in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century”

Maria Saveria Ruga, Lecturer, Accademia di Belle Arti di Catanzaro, “The Progress of America (1880) by Andrea Cefaly:  Social Reform in Italy and the United States”

Lindsay Harris, Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge, School of Classical Studies, American Academy in Rome, “Capital ‘Wastelands’:  Photography in Rome and Washington, DC at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”

Andrea Mariani, Professor Emeritus, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Università G. D’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara, “Statues in Rome:  Political Allegories and Cultural Archetypes”