Riddles of Form: Exploration and Discovery in Word and Image

Tenth International IAWIS/AIERTI Conference

University of Dundee, Scotland

11-15 August 2014

Abstracts for each of the sessions listed above can be found at:

http://www.scottishwordimage.org/conferences/iawis2014/list_of_sessions.htm

We invite submissions of proposals for 20 minute papers (abstract 250-300 words).

The extended deadline for submissions is Friday December 6, 2013.

Please contact swig2014@gmail.com to submit abstracts or with any further queries. Please indicate the title of the session at which your proposal is aimed and supply full contact information.

There will also be general sessions on Word and Image topics, so proposals do not necessarily have to fit into the sessions specified.

2015 IAAS Annual Conference

24^th & 25^th April, Trinity College Dublin

Sight Unseen:

Seeing, Surveillance, and the Visual Sphere in American Culture

Standing on the bare ground […] all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all […].

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836)

From the maps of early explorers and the surveying techniques of those who carved up the land; through the Puritans’ anxious scrutiny of their own souls and those of their neighbours for signs of Satan’s influence; up to the Patriot Act, hacking scandals, and Wikileaks, the history, politics, and aesthetics of sight and seeing, of concealment and surveillance, display and invisibility have been central to the United States’ (and indeed America’s) development as a space and a nation. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, seeing and being seen are particularly pertinent issues in our image-driven culture, ones that are increasingly being taken up by literary critics and cultural commentators as this century progresses.

This conference therefore aims to bring together scholars whose work explores the vast range of texts, experiences, and socio-political structures that touch upon and are touched by the visual realm, especially but not exclusively in relation to sight as an instrument and agent of control and discipline. “Sight Unseen” is a two-day interdisciplinary conference for scholars within the Humanities, at any stage in their careers, with an interest in North America and whose research engages with history, literature, critical theory, drama, film, visual culture, architecture, music, geography, media studies, and political theory. The conference invites proposals for 20-minute presentations on any aspect of our broad theme. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Technologies of seeing and being seen
• The role played by painting, photography, moving pictures, and smart phones in the creation of “America”
• Sight and the body
• Surface and depth
• Light and shadow as cultural metaphors
• The eye and the “I”
• Social and cultural invisibility
• Invisible histories, people, places, events, texts, documents, or issues
• Overexposure, nudity/ nakedness, and/or pornography
• Dress, clothing, and self-display
• Theatricality and performance
• “Big Government”, the Patriot Act, Wikileaks, and the politics of seeing
• War, terrorism, security, and surveillance
• Privacy and self-concealment
• The home and the workplace as sites of visibility
• Consumerism, consumption and the visual
• Surveillance and medicine

The submissions window has now closed

Please contact us at IAASConference@gmail.com if you have any queries.

Please click here more information on the IAAS Annual Conference.

Transnational America(s)

May 18 2013

Trinity College, Dublin

Transnationalism holds particular resonance for American studies. Emerging from fragmented narratives of diaspora and fluid borders, it forms part of the foundational mythology of theUnited States. The term has a long history of use in racial dialectic, but its resonances permeate every aspect of contemporary (inter)national, cultural and economic identity.

Definitions of transnationalism pre-date the racial redefinitions of American identity presented by Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993) or Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). Indeed they stretch back at the very least to Randolph Bourne’s seminal “Trans-National America” essay from 1916 that challenged the validity of ‘the melting-pot’ and redefined what ‘America’ and ‘Americanisation’ meant in the world of the hyphenated-identity. 

Global economics and the pluralist trajectory of dominant economic, social and cultural conditions have now pushed transnationalism beyond a solely ‘racialised’ arc vide Robert A Gross’ “The Transnational Turn” and Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 ASA Presidential address “Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies.”  Such thinking recognises the cognitive and multicultural diasporas that augment and exist independently from the physical diasporic traffic which definedAmerica.  While the globalised, social media-powered geopolitics of the early twenty-first century require that America participates in more sustained, and sustainable, conversations with the wider world, such transnational, and transoceanic, exchanges of ideas, and the hybridic socio-cultural spaces they map, arguably privilege internationalist readings of America.

The IAAS postgraduate and early career scholar conference invites proposals for 20-minute presentations from across the disciplines of American Studies. Suggestions for topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

–                      Exile, Migration, Expatriation and the “Exilic”

–                      Heterotopia

–                      Borderland Studies

–                      Transnational Identity

–                      Transnationalism and Empire

–                      Sovereignty and Globalisation

–                      Comparative Imperialisms/Exceptionalisms

Please direct all enquiries and/or abstract submissions to iaas.symposium@gmail.com marked for the attention of Louise Walsh and Kate Kirwan.

Please note that the deadline for receipt of abstracts is 30 April, 2013.

A downloadable copy of this CFP is available here.

The IAAS postgraduate and early career scholar conference will take place in Trinity College, Dublin on 19 January 2013. Proposals are invited for 20-minute presentations from across the disciplines of American Studies.

This year’s theme is Transnational America(s). Suggested topics include but are not limited to

–                Exile, Migration, Expatriation and the “Exilic”

–                Heterotopia

–                Borderland Studies

–                Transnational Identity

–                Transnationalism and Empire

–                Sovereignty and Globalisation

–                Comparative Imperialisms/Exceptionalisms

Proposals should be submitted to iaas.symposium@gmail.com by 31 December.

Full Call for Papers here: IAAS Symposium CFP 2013 (2)