The 28th Annual
Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies
Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
January 21-23, 2010
Chicago, Illinois
Keynote Speaker: Jean Howard, Columbia University
Keynote address sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago
Organized and run by graduate students, this conference provides a premier opportunity for maturing scholars to present papers, participate in discussions, and develop collaborations across the field of medieval, Renaissance, and early modern studies. Participants find a supportive and collegial forum for their work, meet future colleagues from other institutions and disciplines, and become familiar with the Newberry Library and its resources. Selected papers will be published in a peer-edited online conference proceedings.
In celebration of the Center’s thirtieth anniversary, this year’s conference is expanded to three days and will include nine panels with up to thirty-six student papers, a keynote address by eminent scholar Jean Howard, and a staged reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Shakespeare Project of Chicago.
Call for Papers: Deadline October 15th, 2009
We invite abstracts for 15-20 minute papers from master’s or Ph.D. students on any medieval, Renaissance, or early modern topic. We encourage submissions from disciplines as varied as the literature of any language, history, classics, art history, music, comparative literature, theater arts, philosophy, religious studies, transatlantic studies, disability studies, and manuscript studies. Please submit a curriculum vitae and an abstract of up to 300 words to renaissance@newberry.org.
Priority is given to students from member institutions of the Center for Renaissance Studies Consortium, who may be eligible for reimbursement for travel expenses to attend. See www.newberry.org/renaissance for more information.
Friday, September 25, 2009
The Poetics of Pain: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Representation
Department of Comparative Literature
The Graduate Center - City University of New York
Call for Papers
Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference:
The Poetics of Pain: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Representation
February 25th-26th, 2010
Pain has always occupied a problematic space in any discipline investigating the human condition. The question of how to manage the unmediated experience of pain in the face of the social and ethical imperative to communicate it has spawned countless theories of and approaches to pain itself and its representation. This conference seeks to foster dialogue between a broad range of approaches to pain and suffering, including medical-scientific investigations of the neurological processes involved in the experience of pain, socio-historical analyses of the connection between individual pain and collective trauma and literary/linguistic inquiries into the possibilities and limitations of a poetics of pain. Theorists and thinkers will include, among others, Jean Amery, Elaine Scarry, Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Ballard, Mirbeau and Kafka.
How can the ineffable sensation of physical torment be conveyed by its sufferer, or acknowledged by the other? How is individual suffering converted into collective experience? How, in turn, is an individual’s experience of pain socially determined? How do the varying discourses of pain bring the sufferer into contact with the world and break down the barriers between self and other? What are the conceptual mechanisms that guide our understanding of this physiological experience?
We invite papers from all disciplines approaching the subject from a variety of critical perspectives that explore the ways in which pain is articulated, narrativized, framed, interpreted, subjectivized, and imbued with meaning.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
• Torture, War
• Illness Narratives
• Medical and Diagnostic Language of Pain
• Sadomasochism - from Rousseau and de Sade to LGBT “Leather Scenes”
• Biopolitics
• Animality and Humanism
• Martyrdom and Religious Representations of Suffering
• Theaters of Cruelty
• Politicization of Pain and Collective Accounts of Past Suffering
• Violence and Politics
• Survivor Memoirs
• Victims of Crime and Assault
• Trauma and Testimony
• Physical Suffering in Light of the Cartesian Mind/Body Problem
• Religious and Secular Theodicies
• Victimhood, Voice and Agency
• Desire, pain and subjectivity.
• Technologies of Punishment
• Bioethics
Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20 minute paper by October 10th to painconference@gmail.com. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter's name, institutional and departmental affiliation. We also welcome panel proposals (3-4 papers).
The Graduate Center - City University of New York
Call for Papers
Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference:
The Poetics of Pain: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Representation
February 25th-26th, 2010
Pain has always occupied a problematic space in any discipline investigating the human condition. The question of how to manage the unmediated experience of pain in the face of the social and ethical imperative to communicate it has spawned countless theories of and approaches to pain itself and its representation. This conference seeks to foster dialogue between a broad range of approaches to pain and suffering, including medical-scientific investigations of the neurological processes involved in the experience of pain, socio-historical analyses of the connection between individual pain and collective trauma and literary/linguistic inquiries into the possibilities and limitations of a poetics of pain. Theorists and thinkers will include, among others, Jean Amery, Elaine Scarry, Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Ballard, Mirbeau and Kafka.
How can the ineffable sensation of physical torment be conveyed by its sufferer, or acknowledged by the other? How is individual suffering converted into collective experience? How, in turn, is an individual’s experience of pain socially determined? How do the varying discourses of pain bring the sufferer into contact with the world and break down the barriers between self and other? What are the conceptual mechanisms that guide our understanding of this physiological experience?
We invite papers from all disciplines approaching the subject from a variety of critical perspectives that explore the ways in which pain is articulated, narrativized, framed, interpreted, subjectivized, and imbued with meaning.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
• Torture, War
• Illness Narratives
• Medical and Diagnostic Language of Pain
• Sadomasochism - from Rousseau and de Sade to LGBT “Leather Scenes”
• Biopolitics
• Animality and Humanism
• Martyrdom and Religious Representations of Suffering
• Theaters of Cruelty
• Politicization of Pain and Collective Accounts of Past Suffering
• Violence and Politics
• Survivor Memoirs
• Victims of Crime and Assault
• Trauma and Testimony
• Physical Suffering in Light of the Cartesian Mind/Body Problem
• Religious and Secular Theodicies
• Victimhood, Voice and Agency
• Desire, pain and subjectivity.
• Technologies of Punishment
• Bioethics
Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20 minute paper by October 10th to painconference@gmail.com. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter's name, institutional and departmental affiliation. We also welcome panel proposals (3-4 papers).
Animals and Animality Across the Humanities and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, June 26-27, 2010, Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada)
Keynote: Carol Adams
The emergent field of animal and animality studies is rapidly being articulated across scholarly boundaries. We invite graduate students to enter this growing conversation and approach the topic from perspectives reflecting the broad (inter)disciplinarity of this field. Discussions will use critical animal studies as a conceptual lens in order to investigate issues including the boundaries between self and Other, agency and biological drive, and reason and non-reason; the codes that permeate our conceptions of non-human animals; and the implications of troubling and/or making porous the human/animal divide. Is understanding human beings as embodied subjects ontologically bound to our relationship to non-human animals? In what ways is animal wellbeing crucially implicated in how we think ourselves into and against animals? As part of these discussions, we welcome investigations into the ways that (as Val Plumwood contends) animals, nature, and racial, colonial, and gendered Others function, now and historically, as overlapping sites of difference. We also invite considerations of the relationship between the conceptual economy that posits animality as an exploitable trope and forms of Othering that render animals as salable things. In approaching these topics, we encourage participants to consider how animal and animality studies has impacted other theoretical lenses, including critical race theory and feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical/environmental studies, as well as the attendant politics of our disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the field.
Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
• Thinking with animals / intro-species boundary disruption
• Becoming animals and biocentric ethics
• The boundary between domestic and wild, sentiment and terror
• Making animals 'matter' and the role of affect
• Animal poetry and ecopoetics
• Animals and the nation in the nineteenth century and beyond
• Animals and spectacle (both alive and dead)
• Urban and wild animals and the politics of space
• Animal geographies and environmental histories
• Animals and transnational ecologies
• Speciesm and racism
• Animals and desire / animality and sexuality
• Vegetarianism and the politics of meat
• Animals in language / symbolic animals
• The discourses and iconography of animals in various cultural forms
• The uses of animals in war and torture
• Animal studies now and its future directions
Proposals may reflect traditional and innovative formats, including papers, panels, roundtables, and community dialogues, as well as creative submissions. Please send an abstract of approximately 250 words, along with your name, department, affiliation, and e-mail address to jaime.j.s.denike@queensu.ca. For creative submissions, send 30 lines of poetry or a 300 word excerpt. For information about our call for artistic submissions for our connected Just Act Natural art exhibit, please e-mail visser.lisa@gmail.com .
The deadline for submissions is October 1st, 2009.
Keynote: Carol Adams
The emergent field of animal and animality studies is rapidly being articulated across scholarly boundaries. We invite graduate students to enter this growing conversation and approach the topic from perspectives reflecting the broad (inter)disciplinarity of this field. Discussions will use critical animal studies as a conceptual lens in order to investigate issues including the boundaries between self and Other, agency and biological drive, and reason and non-reason; the codes that permeate our conceptions of non-human animals; and the implications of troubling and/or making porous the human/animal divide. Is understanding human beings as embodied subjects ontologically bound to our relationship to non-human animals? In what ways is animal wellbeing crucially implicated in how we think ourselves into and against animals? As part of these discussions, we welcome investigations into the ways that (as Val Plumwood contends) animals, nature, and racial, colonial, and gendered Others function, now and historically, as overlapping sites of difference. We also invite considerations of the relationship between the conceptual economy that posits animality as an exploitable trope and forms of Othering that render animals as salable things. In approaching these topics, we encourage participants to consider how animal and animality studies has impacted other theoretical lenses, including critical race theory and feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical/environmental studies, as well as the attendant politics of our disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the field.
Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
• Thinking with animals / intro-species boundary disruption
• Becoming animals and biocentric ethics
• The boundary between domestic and wild, sentiment and terror
• Making animals 'matter' and the role of affect
• Animal poetry and ecopoetics
• Animals and the nation in the nineteenth century and beyond
• Animals and spectacle (both alive and dead)
• Urban and wild animals and the politics of space
• Animal geographies and environmental histories
• Animals and transnational ecologies
• Speciesm and racism
• Animals and desire / animality and sexuality
• Vegetarianism and the politics of meat
• Animals in language / symbolic animals
• The discourses and iconography of animals in various cultural forms
• The uses of animals in war and torture
• Animal studies now and its future directions
Proposals may reflect traditional and innovative formats, including papers, panels, roundtables, and community dialogues, as well as creative submissions. Please send an abstract of approximately 250 words, along with your name, department, affiliation, and e-mail address to jaime.j.s.denike@queensu.ca. For creative submissions, send 30 lines of poetry or a 300 word excerpt. For information about our call for artistic submissions for our connected Just Act Natural art exhibit, please e-mail visser.lisa@gmail.com .
The deadline for submissions is October 1st, 2009.
“Post/Imperial Encounters between Spain and Portugal and East Asia”
41st Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 7-11, 2010
Montreal, Quebec - Hilton Bonaventure
With the recent mode of Trans-Atlantic studies in the fields of Hispanic, Lusophone and Latin American studies, much attention has been paid to cultural exchanges between Spain and Portugal and the Americas. This research has greatly enriched understandings of the complexities of this contentious relationship through the cross-disciplinary study of myriad cultural productions, yet it remains largely premised on an image of Spanish and Portuguese identities defined by the conquest and colonization of America. What remains barely discernable in these discussions, are the contours of the “modern” empire and post-imperial discourses that marked the two nations as they entered the 20th century. Considerably less scholarly work has examined texts that reflect on Iberian colonial and imperial endeavors, or that represent the experiences of post-imperial travelers in East Asia during this time. However, fiction and non-fiction narratives of colonial adventures and political resistance, missionary travails, and travel through Japan, China, Korea, Philippines, to mention just a few examples, provide a rich and largely unexplored counterpoint and complement to current understandings of Spain and Portugal post-imperial nations. This seminar will examine Spain and Portugal’s colonial and post/imperial encounters with East Asia as registered in writings in Spanish and Portuguese by peninsular and post/colonial authors from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Please send 250 word abstracts in Spanish, Portuguese or English to David George at dgeorge@bates.edu and Timothy Gaster at gaster@uchicago.edu.
Deadline: September 30, 2009
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee)
Please note that the session is in “seminar” format which means that the 5-10 participants will complete and circulate their papers of no more than 20 pages in length prior to the convention. Instead of reading papers, participants give a brief presentation of 5-10 minutes of their work, with the session focused on structured exchange between the participants. Respondents may be invited by the chair.
The 41st Annual Convention will feature approximately 350 sessions, as well as dynamic speakers and cultural events. Details and the complete Call for Papers for the 2010 Convention will be posted in June: www.nemla.org.
Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.
Travel to Canada now requires a passport for U.S. citizens. Please get your passport application in early.
April 7-11, 2010
Montreal, Quebec - Hilton Bonaventure
With the recent mode of Trans-Atlantic studies in the fields of Hispanic, Lusophone and Latin American studies, much attention has been paid to cultural exchanges between Spain and Portugal and the Americas. This research has greatly enriched understandings of the complexities of this contentious relationship through the cross-disciplinary study of myriad cultural productions, yet it remains largely premised on an image of Spanish and Portuguese identities defined by the conquest and colonization of America. What remains barely discernable in these discussions, are the contours of the “modern” empire and post-imperial discourses that marked the two nations as they entered the 20th century. Considerably less scholarly work has examined texts that reflect on Iberian colonial and imperial endeavors, or that represent the experiences of post-imperial travelers in East Asia during this time. However, fiction and non-fiction narratives of colonial adventures and political resistance, missionary travails, and travel through Japan, China, Korea, Philippines, to mention just a few examples, provide a rich and largely unexplored counterpoint and complement to current understandings of Spain and Portugal post-imperial nations. This seminar will examine Spain and Portugal’s colonial and post/imperial encounters with East Asia as registered in writings in Spanish and Portuguese by peninsular and post/colonial authors from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Please send 250 word abstracts in Spanish, Portuguese or English to David George at dgeorge@bates.edu and Timothy Gaster at gaster@uchicago.edu.
Deadline: September 30, 2009
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee)
Please note that the session is in “seminar” format which means that the 5-10 participants will complete and circulate their papers of no more than 20 pages in length prior to the convention. Instead of reading papers, participants give a brief presentation of 5-10 minutes of their work, with the session focused on structured exchange between the participants. Respondents may be invited by the chair.
The 41st Annual Convention will feature approximately 350 sessions, as well as dynamic speakers and cultural events. Details and the complete Call for Papers for the 2010 Convention will be posted in June: www.nemla.org.
Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.
Travel to Canada now requires a passport for U.S. citizens. Please get your passport application in early.
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