Alice-Catherine

Poetry at the Post: Heading Back in Time in Sarasota with a Fabliau!

Barque of phosphor
On the palmy beach,…

To this droning of the surf.

The twentieth biennial New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies will take place 10–13 March 2016 in . The program committee invites 250-word abstracts of proposed twenty-minute papers on topics in European and Mediterranean history, literature, art, music and religion from the fourth to the seventeenth centuries. In celebration of the conference’s twentieth anniversary, abstracts are particularly solicited for a thread of special sessions reflecting the conference’s traditional interdisciplinary focus: that is, papers that blur methodological, chronological, and geographical boundaries, or that combine subjects and/or approaches in unexpected ways. As always, planned sessions are also welcome. The deadline for all abstracts is 15 September 2015; please see the guidelines below.

Further anniversary events will include a retrospective panel on the conference’s forty-year history and a Saturday evening banquet. In addition, the second Snyder Prize (named in honor of the conference’s founder Lee Snyder, who died in 2012), will be given to the best paper presented at the conference by a junior scholar. The prize carries an honorarium of $400.

The conference is held on the campus of the honors college of the Florida state system. The college, located on Sarasota Bay, is adjacent to the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, which will offer tours arranged for conference participants. Sarasota is noted for its beautiful public beaches, theater, food, art and music. Average temperatures in March are a pleasant high of 77F (25C) and a low of 57F (14C).

More information will be posted here on the conference website (http://www.newcollegeconference.org) as it becomes available, including plenary speakers, conference events, and area attractions.
PLEASE SHARE THIS ANNOUNCEMENT WITH INTERESTED COLLEAGUES.

“Sarasota Ringling estate”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons –

If you are considering submitting an abstract or session proposal, please be aware of the following:
1) So that we can accommodate as many scholars as possible, no one may present a paper in more than one session of the conference. Furthermore, no one should commit to more than two out of the following three activities: 1) presenting a paper; 2) chairing a session; and 3) participating in a roundtable. Organizing sessions does not count in these calculations, but session organizers are subject to them along with everyone else (i.e. you may organize as many sessions as you like, but you may only present one paper, and chair a separate session).

2) Session chairs should not also present in the panel they are chairing. Session organizers may either chair or present in a panel that they have arranged, but not both. If you are organizing a planned session, you may either arrange for a chair and include him/her in your proposal, or submit your panel without a chair and conference organizers will assign one. (The acceptance of your panel will not depend on whether or not your planned session already has a chair.)

3) Those organizing planned sessions should also know that the organizing committee strongly prefers sessions that include participants from more than one institution.

Please email info@newcollegeconference.org with any questions.

Poetry at the Post: Searching for Illumination in the Mystical and the Modern

Note to ekphrastic poets: Check out this upcoming conference at St. Hilda’s College.

There is also a call for contributing artists outside of academia as an exhibition of contemporary art inspired by mystical ideas will be held in the Turl Street Kitchen in central Oxford on Friday evening, January 8, 2016.

Illumination

BY ELIZABETH WOODY
The irresistible and benevolent light
brushes through the angel-wing begonias,
the clippings of ruddy ears for the living room.

Art and Articulation: Illuminating the Mystical, Medieval and Modern.
8th-9th January, 2016,
St Hilda’s College, Oxford

The relationship between word and image, and the ways in which medieval art (be it visual, textual, or both) operates as a means of expressing the inexpressible, will be explored in a two-day conference held in Oxford under the auspice of the Mystical Theology Network.

This interdisciplinary conference will bring together theologians, art historians, and literary scholars to examine the ways in which various forms of artistic expression have been and can be used to articulate the mystical or that which cannot easily be spoken. The principal focus will be art and articulation in medieval works and modern responses to them.

The conference will investigate the role of art and its connection to forms of mystical knowing through various strands. From visual art, through optics, apophasis and ekphrasis to mystical theology, this multidisciplinary approach to illumination will shed new light on the role of art in mystical contemplation.

St. Hilda's College Oxford, UK — St. Hilda’s College
Oxford, UK

CALL FOR PAPERS
We welcome submissions for 20-minute papers and proposals for sessions of three 20-minute papers.

Topics may include, but are by no means confined to:

The interplay between mysticism and art, both visual and textual.
Art (visual, textual or both) as a means of communicating that which is hard to articulate.
Apophasis.
Theorisations of art and beauty and how these relate to notions of mysticism.
Transformative visions and the therapeutic effect of ‘seeing as’.
Medieval and modern ideas on optics, seeing and contemplation/mysticism.
The intersection between visual and textual art.
The role of illuminations and annotations in medieval manuscripts.
Ekphrasis.
Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words to the conference organisers by 1st September 2015.

We warmly welcome papers from graduate students.

We also warmly welcome contributions from artists outside of academia. For more information about contributing as an artist please contact Tom de Freston.

Music Building St. Hilda's College — Music Building
St. Hilda’s College

Poetry at the Post: Falling in Love with the Cantigas de Santa Maria by Alfonso X

Alfonso X, El Sabio. Cantigas de Santa Maria: Núm. 10, «Rosa de beldad’e de parecer».

(From Lyrics of the Middle Ages, ed. James J. Wilhelm. NY: Garland Publ., 1990, 244.)

“Alfonso wrote or organized the Cantigas de Santa María, a collection of [427] poems in honor of the Virgin, often longish narratives relating her miracles. One of the most important music collections in the Middle Ages, the songs were often sung on pilgrimages. The text for this poem in Alvar-Beltrán, pp. 423-424; music, 441. For a tape of the Cantigas, Astrée E7707.”

Rose of roses and flower of flowers,
Lady of ladies, Lord of lords.
1.
Rose of beauty and fine appearance
And flower of happiness and pleasure,
lady of most merciful bearing,
And Lord for relieving all woes and cares;
Rose of roses and flower of flowers,
Lady of ladies, Lord of lords. Rosa das rosas e Fror das frores,
Dona das donas, Sennor das sennores.
1.
Rosa de beldad’ e de parecer
e Fror d’alegria e de prazer,
Dona en mui piadosa ser
Sennor en toller coitas e doores.
Rosa das rosas e Fror das frores,
Dona das donas, Sennor das sennores.

Alfonso X as a judge, from his Libro de los Dados,[2] completed ca. 1280

Check out this opportunity to learn more about Mester de Clerecía in El Paso, Texas this Fall.

“The Cleric’s Craft: Crossroads of Medieval Spanish Literature and Modern Critique”

October 22-24, 2015
University of Texas El Paso

Why Mester de Clerecía in 2015?
The thirteenth century was a dynamic time in the Iberian Peninsula, as political and cultural changes were occurring throughout the realms that occupied what is now Spain and Portugal. Much of the literature of this period was learned in nature and composed by clerics, and although the works were read and studied individually from the time of composition, they did not see collective examination until the nineteenth century. It was in 1865 that the Spanish scholar Manuel Milà i Fontanals used the term “mester de clerecía” (the cleric’s craft) for the first time to refer to this learned literary production.

The study of the mester de clerecía is now 150 years old, and an international conference entitled “The Cleric’s Craft: Crossroads of Medieval Spanish Literature and Modern Critique” will be convened in 2015 to mark this important milestone, to reassess this literature and its study, as well as to chart new directions for the field.

For more info, watch this video.

And, here is a link to the music as played by Narcisco Yepes accompanied by the Trio Yepes.

Poetry at the Post: Salvage

Salvage
BY KAY RYAN
The wreck
is a fact.
The worst
has happened.
The salvage trucks
back in…

Gustave Doré's first (of about 370) illustrations for Don Quixote. — Gustave Doré’s first (of about 370) illustrations for Don Quixote.

BCLA2016: Salvage

The University of Wolverhampton’s Faculty of Arts, and the Centre for Transnational & Transcultural Research, are proud to host the 14th International Triennial Conference of the British Comparative Literature Association.

Organisers: Dr Glyn Hambrook and Gabriela Steinke, University of Wolverhampton

BCLA2016: Salvage considers the international and transnational circulation of textuality in the broadest comparative and historical terms, not merely as a process that involves the perceived colossi of literature, but one that also charts the byways and alleyways of literary production, the sometimes hidden or obscured debts to individuals, coteries, and literary movements that might have formed (or will one day inform) other or new literary histories.

2016 is also the 400th anniversary of the deaths of Cervantes and Shakespeare, two writers whose lives and works have been salvaged from historical documents, bad quartos, and hearsay so successfully that we hardly question their authenticity. Like any salvage operation, however, literary history has not only attempted to reconstitute the corpa of its hallowed authors, but it has also sanctioned generations of succeeding writers who have reused, recycled, and redeployed words, meanings, and forms through translation, parody, homage, pastiche, adaptation, allusion, intertextuality, and imitation. Salvage, too, knows no borders, as the mighty wrecks of Shakespeare and Cervantes demonstrate: while reclaimed for nationalist narratives, their works have been incorporated into the fabrics of many languages, literatures, and cultural settings.

Procession of Characters from Shakespeare's Plays by an unknown artist — Procession of Characters from Shakespeare’s Plays by an unknown artist

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANELS

Proposals are invited for the Fourteenth Triennial Conference of the British Comparative Literature Association be held at the University of Wolverhampton (UK) from 12-15 July 2016. The theme of the conference is ‘Salvage’, a concept at the very heart of literary and cultural activity. Translation, reception, re-reading – the vital substance of comparative literary research – all refer to processes by which literature’s significance is activated or released in acts of salvage, acts of saving and, indeed, salvation.

Plenary speakers at the conference will include Professor (Emeritus) David Constantine and Dr Susan Jones (St Hilda’s College, Oxford).

The year 2016 will see a number of anniversaries from the domain of literary and cultural studies within the European sphere alone. Prominent among these is a shared 400th anniversary, that of the death of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. This anniversary, we envisage, will form a thematic strand running in parallel to the main conference theme.

Paper and panel proposers are invited to consider incorporating this and other anniversaries into their abstracts where a convergence between the anniversary in question and the theme of Salvage can be credibly established.

Proposals for Papers:

Proposals are invited for papers, in English, of no more than 20 minutes’ duration, on or in relation to the conference’s theme of Salvage. Proposals, in the form of an abstract of 250 words accompanied by a brief ‘bio-note’ of 50 words at most, should be submitted by email to bcla2016@wlv.ac.uk by no later than 30 September 2015.

The abstract should describe the proposed topic, make clear its connection to the conference’s theme, and indicate briefly how the treatment of the proposed topic constitutes a comparative approach to and analysis of the material concerned. (In this regard, proposers may refer to the BCLA’s aims.)

Proposals for Panels:

Proposals are invited for panels, in English, comprising 3-4 papers, each of no more than 20 minutes’ duration, on or in relation to the conference’s theme of Salvage. Proposals (see below) should be submitted by email to bcla2016@wlv.ac.uk by no later than 31 August 2015.

Panel proposals should take the form of an abstract of 300-350 words describing the proposed topic, establishing its connection to the conference’s theme, indicating briefly how the treatment of the proposed topic constitutes a comparative approach to and analysis of the material concerned (proposers may refer to the BCLA’s mission statement) and explaining the complementarity of the proposed papers. This abstract should be accompanied by synopses of 150-200 words for each of the papers, together with a brief ‘bio-note’ of no more than 50 words for each contributor.

With regard to the theme of salvage, proposals for panels considering antiquity/monuments, forgotten books and readers and the literature of al Andalus would be particularly welcome.

Deadline for Submission of All Proposals:

31 August 2015 (Panels); 30 September 2015 (Papers): by email to bcla2016@wlv.ac.uk

Keywords:

Retrieval: recuperation, recovery, rediscovery, exhumation, remembering, recollecting, resurrection, repossession;
Saving: rescue, survival, reprieve, restoration, resuscitation, repair, preservation, conservation, consecration, canonization, quotation, re-edition, translation, legitimisation, de-criminalization;
Saving the spirit: redemption, salvation, renaissance, rebirth, liberation, emancipation;
Re-using: recycling, re-processing, triage, bricolage, ecology, scavenging, transformation, imitation, plagiarising, transmutation, adaptation, metamorphosis, anniversary, commemoration;
Reconfiguring: blending, merging, distilling, filtering, abstracting, editing, expurgating, bowdlerising, disguising, distortion;
Remains: rubbish, gold under dirt, detritus, ruins, monuments, residue, ecology, collage;
The antithesis of salvage: suppression, censorship, stigmatization, defamation, repression, eradication, erosion, disarticulation, oblivion, forgetting.

Poetry at the Post: Translating the Untranslatable

Translation
BY JON PINEDA
We thought nothing of it, he says,
though some came so close to where we slept.

I try to see him as a boy,
back in the Philippines, waking

A Tagalog couple of the Maginoo caste depicted on a page of the 16th-century Boxer Codex.

Call for participants: “Untranslatability and Cultural Complexity”

Translation Studies Research Symposium
Friday, September 25, 2015, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm
Woolworth Building, New York University (NYU)
15 Barclay Street (and Broadway), New York, NY

On behalf of the Dean of the Nida Institute, Dr. Philip H. Towner, the Executive Vice-President of the San Pellegrino University Foundation, Prof. Stefano Arduini, and the Director of the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation, and Interpreting at the NYU School of Professional Studies, Dr. Milena Savova, you are kindly invited to attend the 5th annual Translation Studies Research Symposium, to be held Friday, September 25, 2015 at New York University’s Woolworth building at Barkely St. and Broadway.

This year’s Research Symposium takes up the theme of “Untranslatability and Cultural Complexity.” We are delighted and honored that the following presenters have been confirmed:

Lydia H. Liu (Columbia University)
Mary Louise Pratt (New York University)
Michael Wood (Princeton University)
Philip E. Lewis (Cornell University)

Registration for the Research Symposium is $25 and is due no later than September 11, 2015. You can register for the symposium by contacting us at abs.us/researchsymposium2015. For more details about the presenters, please see http://nsts.fusp.it/events/Symposium-2015, which includes a printable 2015 NSTS Research Symposium Flyer. Please feel free to share with any who might be interested

Poetry at the Post: Cruising Medieval Manuscripts with John Lydgate

from The Testament of John Lydgate
BY JOHN LYDGATE

Beholde, o man! lyft up thyn eye and see
What mortall peyne I suffre for thi trespace.
With pietous voys I crye and sey to the:
Beholde my woundes, behold my blody face,
Beholde the rebukes that do me so manace,
Beholde my enemyes that do me so despice,
And how that I, to reforme the to grace,
Was like a lambe offred in sacryfice.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Manuscript as Medium
March 5-6, 2016
Speakers Include:
Jessica Brantley, Yale University
Kathryn Rudy, University of St. Andrews
Andrew Taylor, University of Ottawa
This conference is devoted particularly to current concern with manuscripts in all their physicality. Across the disciplines, investigators delight in the sometimes untidy, often beautiful, pages of manuscripts-bound as apparently heterogeneous miscellanies, glossed and amended over the centuries, enhanced with illuminations or with printed illustrations latterly pasted in.

We welcome papers on any topic related to these issues, including technical investigations of production; manuscripts and monastic communities; image and text on the manuscript page; Jewish-Christian relations and sacred books; Islam, the west, and manuscripts; manuscripts as stand-ins for sacred or political figures; the hybrid manuscript-print codex in the age of incunabula; accessibility and immateriality of the manuscript in the digital age.

We invite abstracts for traditional twenty-minute presentations or short contributions to a Flash Session; each Flash paper will be 5 minutes long and should be accompanied by a focused visual presentation.

St. John's College, c.1905 — St. John’s College, c.1905

Please submit an abstract and cover letter with contact information by September 15, 2015 to Center for Medieval Studies, FMH 405b, Bronx, NY 10458, by e-mail to medievals@fordham.edu, or by fax to 718.817.3987.

Poetry at the Post: Moments of Becoming

Becoming a Redwood
BY DANA GIOIA
Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds
start up again. The crickets, the invisible
toad who claims that change is possible,…

‘Moments of Becoming’ Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

Moments of Becoming: Transitions and Transformations in Early Modern Europe

University of Limerick, Ireland, 20-21 November 2015.

The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to explore the theme of ‘becoming’ in early modern European and Irish culture. The early modern period itself is often understood as a time of transition, but how did the people of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries experience periods of transformation/transition in their own lives and work, and how were these processes accomplished and accommodated? Conference papers will explore changes to personal, professional, religious or political identity and identifications, as well as understandings of transformations of state, status and nature more broadly.

"UniversityOfLimerick PlasseyHouse" by Lukemcurley - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia - — “UniversityOfLimerick PlasseyHouse” by Lukemcurley – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia –

Plenary Speakers: Professor Daniel Carey, Professor Raymond Gillespie, Professor Alison Rowlands.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on themes that might include:

Transition in religion and politics

Religious conversion
Alterations to political sympathies
Migration and naturalisation
Becoming a soldier, priest, rebel, martyr, hero or villain
Personal transformations

Acquiring competencies, skills or professional training
Social mobility, upwards or downwards
Becoming a parent
Rites of passage
Transition and the supernatural

Death and movement to the next world
Magical and miraculous transformations
Textual and performative transformations

Responses to societal transitions in poetry and prose
Transforming texts via translation, printing or performance
The use of space and material culture in ceremonial/ritual contexts

Please submit an abstract of about 250 words to Richard Kirwan (Richard.Kirwan@ul.ie) or Clodagh Tait (Clodagh.Tait@mic.ul.ie) before 10th July 2015.

This conference will occur under the auspices of the Limerick Early Modern Forum of the University of Limerick and Mary Immaculate College. The conference is funded by the Irish Research Council New Foundations Scheme. The organisers plan to publish a volume of essays drawn from the conference papers.

Organisers: Dr Liam Chambers (MIC), Dr Michael J. Griffin (UL), Dr Richard Kirwan (UL), Dr Clodagh Tait (MIC).

Poetry at the Post: The Blonde Sonata, Anita Loos & Edith Wharton in Washington DC

Update: Check out the Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence Program here. Deadline August 31, 2015.

The Blonde Sonata
by John Frederick Nimms

The waitress in the tavern brought me down.
Tiara lace on tassel of gold hair.
Trim breasted, crescent thighed, tulip ankled
Eye robin’s egg, impertinent moist lip…

“Edith Wharton called Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ‘the great American novel’ and declared its author a genius. Winston Churchill, William Faulkner, George Santayana and Benito Mussolini read it – so did James Joyce, whose failing eyesight led him to select his reading carefully. The 1925 bestseller sold out the day it hit the stores and earned Loos more than a million dollars in royalties.(Cynthia Haven, “Stanford News)

Anita Loos and John Emerson by Edward Steichen for Vanity Fair, July 1928

Anita Loos was a contemporary of some awesome writers, including Edith Wharton. We’ll be reading Wharton’s The Custom of the Country in The Global Reading Group, a virtual literary salon, this upcoming Fall. Free and open to all. Click here to join.

Call for Papers

Wharton in Washington: A Conference Sponsored by the Edith Wharton Society

June 2-4, 2016

Please join the Edith Wharton Society for its upcoming Conference in Washington, DC. The conference directors seek papers focusing on all aspects of Wharton’s work. Papers might offer readings of any of Wharton’s texts, including the short fiction, poetry, plays, essays, travel writing, and other nonfiction, in addition to the novels. While all topics are welcome, the location of the conference in the U. S. capitol invites readings related to nationalism, cosmopolitanism, transatlanticism, seats of power, Americana, museum cultures in the 19th C, material cultures, and the work of preservation. Further, given the centennial years of World War I, papers offering new examinations of Wharton’s relationship to the war are particularly invited. Proposals might also explore Wharton’s work in the context of such figures as Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Adams or Wharton’s work in relation to that of her contemporaries, such as Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, Anita Loos, Henry James, and more. All theoretical approaches are welcome, including feminist, psychoanalytic, historicist, Marxist, queer studies, affective studies, disability studies, and ecocritical perspectives.

The L'Enfant Plan for Washington, D.C., as revised by Andrew Ellicott in 1792 — The L’Enfant Plan for Washington, D.C., as revised by Andrew Ellicott in 1792

We plan to organize paper sessions, roundtables, and panel presentations. In addition, there will be a keynote speaker and opportunities for tours of local exhibits. Further details forthcoming at the conference website https://whartoninwashington2016.wordpress.com/.

Please submit 350-500-word abstracts and brief CV as one Word document toWhartoninWashington2016@gmail.com by July 15, 2015.

All conference participants must be members of the Edith Wharton Society at the time of registration.

Poetry at the Post: It’s Going To Be All About Ireland in South Dakota!

Behind the Plow
BY LEO DANGEL
I look in the turned sod
for an iron bolt that fell
from the plow frame
and find instead an arrowhead…

Call for Papers

The 31st Annual Meeting  of the  American Conference for Irish Studies Western Regional “Ireland: Memory and Monument” Rapid City, South Dakota October 16-18, 2015

Submissions due July 1, 2015 to aciswest2015@gmail.com

We invite you to join us in Rapid City, South Dakota for the 31st annual ACIS-West conference. This interdisciplinary conference features a range of scholarly panels, lectures, readings, exhibits, and performances. We welcome papers on any aspect of Irish studies, including literature, theatre, film, dance, history, economics, sociology, music, religion, politics, language, culture, diaspora, conflict and border studies, the material and visual arts, and comparative studies. We particularly encourage papers and panels that explore the theme of “Ireland: Memory and Monument.”

Topics may include, but are not limited to, Official forms of commemoration, like statues, plaques, monuments, parades, ceremonies, holidays, as well as their reappropriation Contested memorials and counter-memorials Buried or erased memories; modes of forgetting Private versus collective/public memory Memorialization and the sacred Geography and regional or local memory Literary and artistic commemorations Transnational memory (e.g. the Irish diaspora, immigrants to Ireland) The business of commemoration: tourism, financing, the media We welcome not only papers that consider the question of the memorialization within Ireland, but also comparative work that addresses Irish intersections with the global circulation and preservation of memory.

A South Dakota farm during the Dust Bowl, 1936

The conference features keynote speaker David C. Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and keynote performer Donal O’Kelly, award-winning playwright and actor who will stage his play Fionnuala for conference participants. Western South Dakota, home to some of the nation’s most famous and contested monuments and counter-monuments, provides a rich site in which to explore the preservation and politics of memory. Downtown Rapid City, founded during a gold rush in the 1870s, is steeped in history—statues of U.S. presidents grace every corner, and stories of the Lakota are told through commemorative plaques and statues—while also boasting a lively arts and music scene, restaurants, shopping, and nightlife.

The conference will take place at the historic Hotel Alex Johnson, which appears on the National Register of Historic Places, has hosted six U.S. Presidents, and is also said to be haunted. The conference organizers invite you to explore Rapid City, “The Gateway to the Black Hills,” as well as its many nearby attractions, including Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, Custer State Park, the historic Black Hills 1880 Train, the city of Deadwood, the Badlands National Park, and the Devil’s Tower. Please submit your proposal by July 1, 2015 to aciswest2015@gmail.com.

Panoramic view of Sixth and Main Streets in Rapid City, ca. 1912

Individual paper and panel submissions (3-4 participants) are welcome, as are proposals for live performances, dramatic readings, poster presentations, or exhibits. Individual proposals should be 250-500 words in length and include a brief biographical statement for the submitter (50 words). In the case of panel proposals, live performances, dramatic readings, posters, or exhibits, please submit a rationale (250-500 words), as well as biographical statements for each of the presenters.

To recognize undergraduate research in Irish Studies, we will also organize a special undergraduate panel at the conference, and we encourage exceptional undergraduate students to submit individual paper proposals. For more information, visit https://aciswest.wordpress.com/

Poetry at the Post: To Kashmir & More via Agha Shahid Ali

TONIGHT

BY AGHA SHAHID ALI
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar
—Laurence Hope

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?

Those “Fabrics of Cashmere—” “to make Me beautiful—”
“Trinket”—to gem—“Me to adorn—How tell”—tonight?

A Muslim shawl making family shown in Cashmere shawl manufactory, 1867, chromolith., William Simpson.

Call for Papers!

22-23 September 2016 – “Partition and Empire: Ireland, India, Palestine and Beyond (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

The imperial partitions of the twentieth century reverberate to the present, and inform contemporary insecurities of different regimes across the world. Present-day challenges to the postcolonial nationstate and its boundaries are often rooted in imperial partitions. Whether in Kashmir, Syria or Palestine, the legacies of partition form the everyday experiences of conflict and violence for millions of people. With these considerations in mind, this conference will explore the theme of partition and empire in global, comparative, and connective frames. Though we focus on the partitions of Ireland, India, and Palestine, we welcome papers addressing imperial partitions in other regions of the world. Topics include but are not limited to violence; sovereignty; sexuality and the body; displacement and dispossession; memory and cultural production; territoriality and borders; identity and state formation; pedagogies and/or epistemologies of partition. We invite a title and abstract of 250 words due emailed to partitionsconferenceUIUC@gmail.com. Conference attendees will pre-circulate papers (of about 8,000 words including footnotes), due August 19, 2016. Travel and accommodation will be provided for all conference attendees.

General view of Temple and Enclosure of Marttand (the Sun), at Bhawan, ca. 490–555; the colonnade ca. 693–729. Surya Mandir at Martand, Jammu & Kashmir, India, photographed by John Burke, 1868.

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