Tuesday, 19 February 2013

Seminar: Private Books for Educational Use - the Formation of the Northern Congregational College Library

Tuesday 26 February 5.15-6.45pm

Demonstration of a new digital resource charting how early nonconformist readers in Lancashire and Yorkshire interacted with their books.

Speakers: Dr Ben Bankhurst (Queen Mary, University of London), Dr Rachel Eckersley (Queen Mary, University of London), Ed Potten (Cambridge University Library)

The Northern Congregational College Project will make available in digital form the Catalogue of the Library of the Lancashire Independent College, Manchester (1885) and details of the 2,400 surviving books from the library of the Northern Congregational College, formed in 1958 from the amalgamation of two major Congregational colleges founded in the nineteenth century, Lancashire Independent College and Yorkshire United Independent College. In 1984 the Northern Congregational College became Northern College (United Reformed and Congregational). Most such libraries were founded on private collections and supplemented over generations through bequest and donation. Selected books were acquired in 1975/6 by the The John Rylands Library. These books, dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, are unusually rich in provenance and evidence of use. Perhaps most interesting are the marks of ownership and use of the everyday reader – men and women who owned only a handful of books and whose annotations are the only evidence of their interaction with them.

The details, including high-resolution images of bookplates, inscriptions and annotations, will be published on Dissenting Academies Online: Virtual Library System, a union catalogue which represents the holdings and loans of selected Baptist, Congregational, and Presbyterian/Unitarian academies in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which forms part of the ongoing Dissenting Academies Project. The Virtual Library System will be introduced by Professor Isabel Rivers (Queen Mary, University of London) and Dr David Wykes (Dr Williams’s Library, London).

Booking is essential, please contact our Customer Services Team on 0161 306 0555 or via email.

OUT NOW: The Modern Vampire and Human Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Edited by Deborah Mutch



Blurb: Why are we surrounded by vampires in the twenty-first century? From the global phenomena of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse, through films such as Underworld and Blade, television series such as the The Vampire Diaries and Being Human, to video games like Bloodrayne and Legacy of Kain, the reader, viewer and player has never had so many vampires to choose from. This collection considers the importance of the current flurry of vampires for our sense of human identity. Vampires have long been read as bodies through which our sense of ourselves has been reflected back to us. These essays offer readings of the modern vampire as a complex consideration of our modern human selves. Now that we no longer see the vampire as essentially evil, what does that say about us.

Editor: Deborah Mutch is a senior lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She has recently become interested in the modern Gothic and has published an article on the Twilight and Sookie Stackhouse series in Critical Survey. She has also published widely on fin-de-siecle British socialist fiction.

Contents:

1. Blood, Bodies, Books: Kim Newman and the Vampire as Cultural Text by Keith Scott
2. Buffy vs. Bella: Gender, Relationships and the Modern Vampire by Bethan Jones
3. 'Hell! Was I Becoming a Vampyre Slut?': Sex, Sexuality and Morality in Young Adult Vampire Fiction by Hannah Priest
4. Consuming Clothes and Dressing Desire in the Twilight Series by Sarah Heaton
5. Whiteness, Vampires and Humanity in Contemporary Film and Television by Ewan Kirkland
6. The Vampiric Diaspora: The Complications of Victimhood and Post-memory as Configured in the Jewish Migrant Vampire by Simon Bacon
7. Vampires and Gentiles: Jews, Mormons and Embracing the Other by Clare Reed
8. Transcending the Massacre: Vampire Mormons in the Twilight Series by Yael Maurer
9. The Gothic Louisiana of Charlaine Harris and Anne Rice by Victoria Amador
10. Matt Haig's The Radleys: Vampires for the Neoliberal Age by Deborah Mutch

Saturday, 16 February 2013

Symposium: Isidore of Seville: Transforming Knowledge from Scriptorium to Cyberspace

Isidore of Seville (d. 636 CE) is a crucial figure in the preservation and propagation of Classical and Patristic learning. He put such learning to varied use in his own day, in the process ensuring that it could be made useful for future generations. Because of the depth of what he preserved and the breadth of its diffusion, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Isidore the patron saint of the Internet in 1997. This one day symposium looks at the sources on which Isidore drew, how he selected and arranged them for future use, and what posterity made of his legacy.

DATE: Thursday 18th April 2013

VENUE: Instituto Cervantes, 326/330 Deansgate, Campfield Avenue Arcade, Manchester 

PAPERS:

- Andy Fear (Manchester), A Grand Design: Isidore and the natural world

- Laura Carlson (Queen's University, Canada), The use of Isidore in the Opus Caroli

- Martin Ryan (Manchester), The Reception of the Writings of Isidore in the Atlantic Archipelago in the Early Middle Ages

- Amy Fuller, (Nottingham Trent), Archiving Idolatry: Isidore and the recording of native superstition in the New World

- Jamie Wood (Lincoln), LA Law: Isidore, late antique legal sources and the Carolingians

- Melissa Markauskas (Manchester), Rylands MS Latin 12: A Carolingian example of Isidore’s reception into the Patristic Canon?‏

Other contributors include: Mary Beagon (Manchester), Jeremy Lawrance (Nottingham), David Langslow (Manchester), Andrew Laird (Warwick) and Jeremy Tambling (Manchester).

Contact Jamie Wood for further information or if you would like to register for the symposium.

Thursday, 14 February 2013

Workshop: Crusade Preaching and Propaganda

A Workshop on Primary Sources

29-30 March 2013, University of Kent, Canterbury

When the crusades became institutionalised by the end of the 12th century, so did the promoting of the crusades. Preachers and papal legates were sent out and manuscripts as well as works of art were commissioned and spread throughout Europe, all in order to achieve the ultimate goal: the recapture of Jerusalem. A workshop at Canterbury and two series of sessions at the Kalamazoo and Leeds International Congresses will be addressing crusade preaching and propaganda in the 13th century, as well as drawing comparisons with earlier and later periods, between different European regions, and between East and West.

Workshop Participants*

- Rania Abdellatif (Université Paris IV) - Saladin's Transformation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
- Stephen Bennett (Queen Mary, University of London) - Gerard of Wales
- Barbara Bombi (University of Kent) - Commentator
- Esperanza de los Reyes Aguilar (Universidad de León) - Bishop Jerónimo de Perigord and the Images of Power
- Frances Durkin (University of Birmingham) - Commentator
- Constantinos Georgiou (University of Cyprus) - Sermons of Pope Clement VI
- Martin Hall (Royal Holloway, University of London) - John of Garland
- Bernard Hamilton (University of Nottingham) - Commentator
- Elizabeth Lapina (University of Kent) - Mural Paintings of St. George Fighting Saracens
- Nicholas Morton (Nottingham Trent University) - First Crusade Charters
- Alan V. Murray (University of Leeds) - German Crusading Songs
- Marcello Pacifico (Università di Palermo) - The Letters of Frederick II
- Natalia Petrovskaia (University of Cambridge) - The Welsh 'Charlemagne Cycle'
- Valentin Portnykh (Novosibirsk State University) - Humbert of Romans
- Matthieu Rajohnson (Université Paris Ouest) - Crusade Liturgy
- Mahmoud Said Omran (Alexandria University) - The Armenian Propagandist Hayton of Croycus's Proposals to Recover Jerusalem (1307)
- Thomas Smith (Royal Holloway, University of London) - The Papal Registers of Honorius III (1216-1227)
- Carol Sweetenham - The First Crusade in Sermon Exempla
- Paul Trio (KU Leuven) - Medieval Dutch Pilgrim Literature
- Nickiphoros Tsougarakis (University of Kent) - Crusading Propaganda in Medieval Greece
- Jan Vandeburie (University of Kent) - Jacques de Vitry's 'Historia Orientalis'
- Benjamin Weber (Université de Toulouse) - 15th-Century Papal Bulls

(*Titles of presentations are provisional. A final programme with abstracts will be sent out to all registered or interested attendees.)

Programme (provisional):

Thursday 28 March

Evening: Arrivals and Drinks

Friday 29 March

9.00-10.00: Arrivals / Registration

10.00-11.00: Carol Sweetenham, Nicholas Morton

Tea/Coffee

11.15-12.15: Esperanza de los Reyes Aguilar, Matthieu Rajohnson

12.15-13.15: Rania Abdellatif, Elizabeth Lapina

Lunch

14.00-16.00: Collections of the Cathedral Library

Tea/Coffee

16.15-17.15: Stephen Bennett, Martin Hall

17.15-18.15: Alan V. Murray, Paul Trio, Natalia Petrovskaia

Wine Reception

Dinner

Saturday 30 March

9.00-10.00: Mahmoud Said Omran, Nickiphoros Tsougarakis

10.00-11.00: Marcello Pacifico, Thomas Smith

Tea/Coffee

11.15-12.15: Valentin Portnykh, Jan Vandeburie

12.15-13.15: Constantinos Georgiou, Benjamin Weber

Lunch

Conclusions

*Afternoon Activity*

Collections of the Franciscan International Study Centre

Departures

Attending the workshop as non-participant is possible upon registration and cash/cheque payment of:
University of Kent Students: Free
Attendance Friday: 50 GBP / 30 GBP (Student Concession)
Attendance Saturday: 25 GBP / 15 GBP (Student Concession)
Included in the fee:
Registration and Welcome Pack
Participation in the visits to the Special Collections of the Franciscan International Study Centre and/or the Canterbury Cathedral Library
Coffee/Tea and Refreshments
Sandwich Lunch

Please note that places are limited!

Registration is possible until 15 March 2013

To register or for more information, please contact Jan Vandeburie 
Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Rutherford College, University of Kent
Canterbury CT2 7NX, UK

Further Events:

9-12 May 2013, 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo:
‘Jacques de Vitry: His Career, Writings, and Impact’

- Thieves of Time: The Usurer and the Prostitute in Jacques de Vitry's Exempla Stacie Vos (Yale)
- What Was Jacques de Vitry's Role in Christian-Muslim Relations While Resident in Acre? Elizabeth Binysh (Cardiff)
- ‘De Pollanis, Subole a Patribus Degeneri’ - Jacques de Vitry’s ‘Historia Orientalis’ and the Reform Movement of the Fourth Lateran Council Jan Vandeburie (Kent)
- Jacques of Vitry and the Medieval Universal History Caroline Wilky (University of Notre Dame)

1-4 July 2013, 20th International Medieval Congress, Leeds:
‘Ad Crucesignatos - Crusade Preaching and Propaganda’

- Reflections and Refractions of the First Crusade in Sermon Exempla Carol Sweetenham, University of Warwick
- Preaching the Crusades: Patterns and Impact of Recruitment Campaigns in the 11th and 12th Centuries Frances Durkin, School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham
- 'Societas Christiana' and Its Unity in 12th-Century Crusade Propaganda Sini Kangas, Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki
- The Lord's Great Bargain: Explanations of the Effect of Crusade Indulgences in Sermons from Bernard of Clairvaux to Jacques de Vitry Ane L. Bysted, University of Aarhus
- Papal Legates and Crusade Preaching under Honorius III (1216-1227) Thomas William Smith, Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London
- De Peregrinatione Cruce Signatorum - Promoting the Crusade in Jacques de Vitry's 'Historia Orientalis' Jan Vandeburie, University of Kent
- Papal Propaganda and the Crusades, 1213-1253 Marcello Pacifico, Università degli Studi di Palermo
- 'Arma Crucemque Cano': John of Garland's Epic Crusading Appeal Following the Seventh Crusade Martin Hall, Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London
- Preaching War against the Turks in the Baltic Regions: Many Questions and Few Answers Benjamin Weber, Université de Toulouse

With the kind support of:
University of Kent:
School of History
Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East

Wednesday, 13 February 2013

Queer Utopias - Public Events

Manchester Queer Cultures Research Network and University of Manchester Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture

Queer Utopias

Public Events - All Welcome

Thursday 21 February
Professor Ulrike Dahl (Södertörn, Sweden): Femmembodiment: Notes on Queer Feminine Shapes of Vulnerability.
Venue: Room A112, Samuel Alexander Building, 5-7pm.

Tuesday 19 March
Professor Clare Hemmings (LSE)
'The Voice of Love is Calling, Wildly Beating Against their Breasts': Emma Goldman, Sexual Freedom and the Homosexual Archive.
Venue: Room A101, Samuel Alexander Building, 5-7pm.

Tuesday 7 May
Dr Kaye Mitchell (Manchester)
Queer Metamorphoses: Girl Meets Boy and the Futures of Queer Fiction.
Venue: Room A113, Samuel Alexander Building, 5-7pm.

Tuesday 11 June
Dr David Alderson (Manchester)
Is Capitalism Progressive (for Queers)?
Venue: Room A112, Samuel Alexander Building, 5-7pm.

Friday, 18 January 2013

Call for Submissions: Wounds, Torture and the Grotesque

Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies

Hortulus is a refereed, peer-reviewed, and born-digital journal devoted to the culture, literature, history, and society of the medieval past.

For the spring issue we are highly interested in reviews of books which fall under the current special topic. Our upcoming issue will be published in the spring of 2013, and concerns itself with the theme: wounds, torture, and the grotesque. These subjects have become increasingly popular in medieval scholarship. Hortulus invites full-length articles which consider these themes either individually or in tandem. We particularly encourage the submission of proposals that take a strongly theoretical and/or interdisciplinary approach, and that examine new and previously unconsidered aspects of these subjects.

Possible topics may be drawn from any discipline. Submission guidelines can be found on our website. Contributions may be submitted to the editors via email and are due February 15, 2013. If you are interested in submitting a paper but feel you would need additional time, please send an email and details about an expected time-scale for your submission.

Contact details:
Facebook
Twitter 
Website 
Email

Coming Soon... Aimee and the Bear by Toby Stone

So, this post is about a book I've recently edited, rather than a book I've written, but I'm so excited about it I thought it deserved a post.



Aimee and the Bear is the absolutely stunning debut novel by Toby Stone, to be published by Hic Dragones in February 2013. It's a dark (sometimes very dark) fantasy story about a troubled young girl who makes a dangerous journey into the world of her imagination. Stuffed to the brim with echoes of Oz, Wonderland and 100 Aker Wood - but with its feet firmly in early twenty-first-century Manchester - Aimee and the Bear is no children's story. It's captivating and unsettling piece of Manc magic realism that'll change the way you look at teddy bears (and Russian dolls) forever.

Aimee and the Bear is being launched on February 7th 2013, at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, with readings and wine reception. It's a free event, and there's more details on the launch party website. If you can make it, it'll be a great night. If you can't make it, I strongly recommend you get hold of a copy of the book as soon as you can!

OUT NOW: Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (Punctum Books, 2012)

Edited by Myra Seaman, Eileen Joy and Nicola Masciandaro



A new title from open-access publisher, Punctum Books, Dark Chaucer: An Assortment is now available in both print and digital formats. The open-access eBook is available for free, and the paperback edition is priced at $15 - both are available direct from the publishers. If you download the eBook, please also consider making a donation to support the publishers in fostering and developing new and innovative scholarship.

About the book:

Although widely beloved for his playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer's poetry is also shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom. Opting to dilate rather than cordon off this darkness, this volume assembles a variety of attempts to follow such moments into their folds of blackness and horror, to chart their endless sorrows and recursive gloom, and to take depth soundings in the darker recesses of the Chaucerian lakes in order to bring back palm- or bite-sized pieces (black jewels) of bitter Chaucer that could be shared with others... an assortment, if you will. Not that this collection finds only emptiness and non-meaning in these caves and lakes. You never know what you will discover in the dark.


Contents:

'and here we are as on a darkling plain' - Gary J. Shipley
'Dark Whiteness: Benjamin Brawley and Chaucer' - Candace Barrington
'Saturn's Darkness' - Brantley Bryant and Alia
'A Dark Stain and a Non-Encounter' - Ruth Evans
'Chaucerian Afterlives: Reception and Eschatology' - Gaelan Gilbert
'Black Gold: The Former (and Future) Age' - Leigh Harrison
'Half Dead: Parsing Cecelia' - Nicola Masciandaro
'In the Event of the Franklin's Tale' - J. Allan Mitchell
'Black as the Crow' - Travis Neal and Andrew Richmond
'Unravelling Constance' - Hannah Priest
'L'O de V: A Palimpsest' - Lisa Schamess
'Disconsolate Art' - Myra Seaman
'Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye' - Karl Steel
'The Physician's Tale as Hagioclasm' - Elaine Treharne
'The Light Has Lifted: Trickster Pandare' - Bob Valasek
'Suffer the Little Children, or, A Rumination on the Faith of Zombies' - Lisa Weston
'The Dark is Light Enough: The Layout of the Tale of Sir Thopas' - Thomas White

About the publisher:

Punctum Books is an open-access and print-on-demand independent publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. For more information, please visit the Punctum Books website.

Sunday, 13 January 2013

CFP: Borderlines XVII: Occupying Space

19th-21st April 2013
Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin

Trinity College Dublin are very pleased to announce the call for papers for this year’s Borderlines postgraduate conference kindly funded by the School of English, the Department of History, the Medieval History Research Centre and the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) TCD.

The theme of Borderlines XVII will be Occupying Space. There is arguably no greater link to our past than that which is tactile. The castles and cathedrals which still occupy our urban and rural spaces are a bridge between the medieval and the modern. The manuscripts and books which have lasted centuries can tell us as much as the contents within. The tools, toys, weapons, clothes and everyday objects our forebears took for granted do not simply embellish historical events, they tell stories all by themselves.

In this conference, we hope to delve into material culture and the concept of physical presence, be it animate or inanimate, from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. We welcome papers from researchers in the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology, Codicology, Drama, Film Studies, Folklore, History, History of Art, Languages, Literature, Music, Paleography, Philosophy and Theology. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

-Human relation to objects
-Tools and objects in daily life
-Musical instruments
-Architecture
-Devotional objects
-Art and sculpture
-The body – living or dead
-Weaponry and warfare
-Manuscripts and books
-Clothing and costumes

Check out the website, Facebook and Twitter for info and updates.

Abstracts of 250 words plus a short bio for a 20-minute paper or poster are welcomed from postgraduates (MA, PhD and Postdoctoral students) and should be submitted by Friday February 22nd 2013 to the conference convenors.

Upcoming Conference: Stasis in the Medieval World

13th-14th April 2013
The Institute of Archaeology, University College London

'Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous, or as wrong as they'd been in the Middle Age(s)?' Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Continuing the discussion begun by the University of York’s ‘Transition in the Medieval World’ conferences in 2012, the Early Medieval Interdisciplinary Conference Series (EMICS) is pleased to present ‘Stasis in the Medieval World’.

The Middle Ages are popularly represented as an age of repetition and stagnation in terms of their political, religious, and artistic culture. Medieval Studies bear the burden of popular conceptions of the ‘Dark Age’, before the flowerings of the Renaissance ushered a return to the progressive wisdom of the Classical era. The reality familiar to scholars and students of the Middle Ages – that theirs was a time of immense transition and transformation – requires no rehearsal. But is there an extent to which medievalism’s reaction to this marginalization has generated a desire to emphasize the period as one of change and development? Might there be equal value in reexamining those things which, conversely, remained static?

This conference approaches the theme of stasis in the broadest possible terms, from the early Anglo-Saxon period to the late medieval. Papers will seek to establish what really did remain static in the medieval period, and how the political and cultural upheavals generated stasis in the form of deadlock or preservation of traditions. The validity of the terms ‘stasis’ and ‘transition’ will be discussed, as well as current perceptions of medieval studies as themselves ‘static’, and the effects of disciplinary constraints.

Registration is essential
Attendance both days (including wine reception): £20.00 waged / £15 unwaged
For enquiries and registration please contact Victoria Symons, Mary Wellesley or Martin David Locker

This conference is organised as part of the Early Medieval Interdisciplinary Conference Series (EMICS)

Monday, 10 December 2012

CFP: 11th Global Conference: Monsters and the Monstrous

Thursday 18th July – Saturday 20th July 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Presentations

This inter and trans-disciplinary project examines all things monstrous; whether real or imagined, ideological or cultural, historic or futuristic. Building on the discussion points of the previous meeting, this year’s event will focus upon points of concentration within issues raised at last years events as well as examining certain aspects of the current ubiquity of particular monsters in contemporary popular culture.

Presentations, papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

-Humans as monsters and monsters as humans: Popular media sensationalism and fascination around humans as mass murderers, serial killers and paedophiles (Hitler, Ted Bundy, etc.) and films such as Saw and Hostel where monsters are very much part of our everyday evironment whilst figures such as Dexter and vegetarian vampires, that only kill animals or bad people, are considered heroes.

-The Zombie Apocalypse: the ubiquity of the zombie in popular culture both of what we are now and what we will/might become. As a political, ideological figure but also its continuing humanification in literature and film (Warm Bodies, Breathers, Wasting Away, Zombie Neighbour etc.)

-Contagion, infection and disease: The continual fears around over population, invasion and infection causing, or caused by ecological, biological or technological viruses. Hybridity, mutation and cultural death-drive.

-Translation, appropriation and interpretation: The movement of monsters across time and cultures. How historical monsters have changed in later manifestations and how different cultures view, appropriate and reinterpret monsters from other nations (i.e. vampires moving from Europe to the USA, to Japan and back again).

-Children and monsters: Children as the target of monsters, children and childhood as monstrous. Monstrous babies & births, adults in children’s bodies. Child vampires, zombies, demons and ghosts.

-Possession: The popularity of films and narratives around the theme of possession and mind control and the resultant anxieties over identity and the ‘true’ self. Demon possession, as in Paranormal Activity and The Devil Inside, Compelling, glamouring and mind control, as in Vampire Diaries and True Blood.

-The resurgence of faeries and fairy tales, as seen in series such as True Blood, Once Upon a Time, Grimm and Haven, and how not all monsters are bad or can only exist in relation to a pre-existing script?

-The continuing use of Nazis and Nazism as a short-hand for cultural and ideological monstrosity, as in Frostbite, Dead Snow, Hellboy 1 & 2, Iron Sky.

All of the above can also be considered in relation to, cultural and geographical specificity, gender and sexuality, ethnicity and historical approaches.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 15th March 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 31st May 2013. Abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: Monsters11 Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication.We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Rob Fisher 

Simon Bacon 

The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 5th Global Conference: Fashion

Monday 9th September – Thursday 12th September 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations

Fashion is a statement, a stylised form of expression, which displays and begins to define a person, a place, a class, a time, a religion, a culture, subcultures, and even a nation. This inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary conference seeks to explore the historical, social, economic, political, psychological and artistic phenomenon of fashion, a powerful component of contemporary culture. Fashion lies at the very heart of persons, their sense of identity and the communities in which they live. Individuals emerge as icons of beauty and style; cities are identified as centres of fashion; the business of fashion is a billions of dollar per annum global industry, employing millions of people. The project will assess the history and meanings of fashion; evaluate its expressions in politics, business, pop culture, the arts, consumer culture, and social media; determine its effect on gender, sexuality, class, race, age, nation and other sources of identity; and explore future directions and trends.

Building on the foundations of previous meetings, publications and collaborations, the conference will be structured around 5 main areas of focus. Each area will have the opportunity to enjoy specific as well as whole group sessions. Papers, presentations, demonstrations and workshops are invited on the following themes:

1. Understanding Fashion

- Fashion, Style, Taste-Making, and Chic
- Fashion and Fashionability
- Fashion and Zeitgeist
- History of Fashion
- The Future of Fashion

2. Learning and Fashion

- Tools and Methodology
- Theorizing Fashion: Disciplines and Perspectives
- Fashion Education and Fashion Studies
- Identifying, Defining and Refining Concept(e.g., ‘style,’ ‘fashion,’ ‘look,’ ‘fad,’ ‘trend,’ ‘in & out’)
- Studying and Documenting Fashion (curatorial practice, collections, archives, and museums)
- Fashion Specialists (e.g., pattern makers, fitters, embroiders, tailors, textile experts)
- The Materials of Fashion

3. Representing and Disseminating Fashion

- Fashion Icons
- Designer and Muses
- Stylists
- Style Guides and Makeover Shows
- Fashion Photography
- Fashion Magazines, Blogs, and Social Media
- Films and Documentaries about Fashion
- Fashion and the Performing Arts, Music and Television
- Celebrities as Fashion Designers

4. Identity and Fashion

- Fashion and Identity (e.g., class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, nation, transnationalism, religion, etc.)
- Fashion: (Sub)Cultures
- Fashion, Politics, and Ideology: e.g., ‘message’ fashion; political platform, regimes, and revolutions)
- Ethical Issues in Fashion (e.g., cruelty free fashion, eco-fashion, exploitative labour, the ‘fakes’ market)
- Fashion as Performance
- Fashion, the Body, and Self-Fashioning (e.g., beauty standards, body art, weight, plastic surgery, etc.)

5. The Business of Fashion

- Fashion Professions and Trades
- Fashion Cities, Fashion Weeks, Fashion’s Night Out
- Fashion Marketing (e.g., brands, flagship stores, guerilla stores, eCommerce)
- Fashion Models
- Fashion Forecasting
- Marketing Platforms (e.g., communication, streaming video, social media, etc.)
- Fashion Markets: Vintage, Nostalgia, Mass, Luxury, Emerging
- Producing Displaying Fashion (production sites, showrooms, runways, window displays, websites, etc.)
- The Rise of the Accessory as a Driving Force of Fashion

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts are due by Friday 15th February 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 21st June 2013. Emails containing the abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: FASHION5 Abstract Submission.

Please Note: In this email please attach TWO versions of your abstract as follows:

1) One with title and body of abstract only (no identification of the author—this version will be for our blind peer review process).

2) The other with the following information about the author(s): affiliation, email, title of abstract, title and body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Jacque Lynn Foltyn 

Dr Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the Critical Issues series of research projects. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 3rd Global Conference: Re-framing Punishment and the Body

Sunday 1st September – Tuesday 3rd September 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Presentations

What is Punishment? Is it about hurting the body? Or is it about pleasure? Or is it neither? There are those who argue that punishment is a mechanism for controlling deviance and deterring crime. Others argue that it is a method that balances the scales of justice. While still others argue that it is a form of controlling behaviour and an expression of power. Accordingly research today is often focused on punishment in terms of offenders, the offence, the state and legal codification. Yet in the 19th century the French sociologist Durkheim maintained that rituals of punishment were not necessarily concerned with the criminal. He argued that punishment involved reordering or making amends for a situation in a way that demonstrated group norm and strengthened moral boundaries – it rebuilt solidarity and social order. More recently Smith (2008) argued that ‘punishment is an activity and communicative process involving the sending and receiving of messages, ambiguity or the analysis of multiple and intersecting, complex and layered systems of meaning’. Overall this suggests that the concept of Punishment is a meaningful site of contestation. Therefore the aim of the project is to develop different ways of understanding the complexity of punishment and/or the body from a variety of perspectives, approaches and practitioner experiences. We encourage unique approaches to punishment in terms of the body and boundary control, whether it is control of evil, the politically subversive, the economically disruptive, or punishment in pursuit of system stability or marginalisation of the liminal. Papers might also consider the operation and consequences of wrongdoing and various forms of societal/social punishment. Accordingly the project welcomes papers, work-in-progress and pre-formed panels from diverse areas of academic study, as well as practitioners. Papers, presentations, reports and workshops are invited, but not limited to, issues broadly related to any of the following themes:

-Changing notions of punishment over time or in particular spaces
-Punishment issues relating to defining the contours of disgust, desire, dread, or the abject
-Body horror and forms of Punishment
-Desire and Punishment (addiction, BDSM, modification, fashion)
-Punishment and its relationship with Pain, Fear and Death
-Punishment, Ritual and Religion/spirituality
-Punishment and Strategies of Control /Order in everyday life or business
-Punishment, War, Enforcement, Education and/or the Family
-Literature, Art, Popular culture and Punishment
-Cultural approaches to punishment
-Abuses of Punishment

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 22nd March 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 21st June 2013. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words. E-mails should be entitled: PUNISH3 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs:

Shona Hill and Shilinka Smith 

Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries series of research projects. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Sunday, 9 December 2012

CFP: Virgin Envy: Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Virginity

Eds. Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos, and Adriana Spahr

Contemporary culture has seen a renewed interest in virgins, from Bella Swan and Edward Cullen to Anastasia Steele to Steve Carrell’s infamous 40-old-virgin to the rise of Purity Clubs. How do we understand these discussions and representations of virginity? Do these texts “re-invent” virginity? Or, do these texts merely repeat “standard” treatments of virginity?

This edited volume aims to work through the poetics and politics of virginity in narrative, poetry, cinema, and popular culture. This volume treats virginity as an area of theoretical, intellectual, and cultural concern in modern texts. The goal is to position virginity as an interdisciplinary matter that must be studied from the widest possible range of perspectives. The editors believe that any study of virginity demands and interdisciplinary and/or intercultural perspective precisely because it is inculcated by so many discourses: religious, cultural, psychological, sociological, anthropology, ethnographic, philosophical, etc. The volume will ideally include essays from the humanities and social sciences, but the editors would welcome papers from outside of the humanities and social sciences.

We welcome papers that recognize the complexity and diversity of virginity. We are especially interested in papers that move beyond normative definitions and understandings of virginity:

• Purity Clubs, Abstinence, and the Silver Ring Thing
• Celebrity Culture and Virginity
• Queer Virginities (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, etc.)
• Male virginities
• Defining virginity lost (and found)
• Hymenoplasty, re-virginization, vaginal rejuvenization, medical interventions
• Cross-­cultural analyses of virginity
• Psychoanalytic, Psychological, Sociological, Philosophical Approaches and the study of Virginity
• Virginity in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture
• Virginity and Identity, Identifying as Virgin, Epistemology of the Virgin’s Closet
• The commodification of virginity, virginity auctions, virginity pornography
• Virginity and confession, religious contexts, psychotherapeutic contexts
• Virginity and Romance

Please send abstracts (500 words, including proposed bibliography) and a brief CV (1-2 pages) by March 1, 2013 to Cristina Santos, Jonathan A. Allan, and Adriana Spahr.

Completed article-length papers (5,000 words, MLA Style) will be due by August 1, 2013. All papers will undergo a peer-­review process before final acceptance and publication.

Thursday, 22 November 2012

CFP: Psalm Culture and the Politics of Translation

Charterhouse Square, QMUL, London
15-17 July 2013

We invite paper and session proposals for an interdisciplinary conference on English responses to the Psalms, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Civil War. Keynote addresses to be given by Daniel Anlezark (Sydney), Brian Cummings (Sussex), Vincent Gillespie (Oxford), Hannibal Hamlin (Ohio State), James Simpson (Harvard) and Eric Stanley (Oxford).

The Psalms have been at the centre of English religious life, language and identity since the Augustinian mission. This conference aims to bring together scholars working in different periods and disciplines to open up new avenues of discussion and debate. We are interested in all aspects of the English Psalm tradition, from the conversion to the Civil War, and possible areas of exploration might include:

■The authority of the vernacular, and the controversy of translation
■Specific contexts for translation (monastic production, translations by prisoners, etc.)
■Psalms as political commentary
■Musical settings of Psalms, on the page and in performance
■Psalm books as physical objects and works of art
■Iconography
■Ecclesiastical and private devotion
■Psalms and the formation of an English literary canon
■Literary borrowings and intertextuality
■Reading, annotating and glossing
■Comparative analysis of individual Psalms across languages and periods
■The Psalms as a site of inter-cultural dialogue (between faiths, between countries)

We welcome proposals for papers (no more than 20 minutes) and panels (of 3 papers) from both established scholars and graduate students. It is envisaged that selected papers will be considered for publication in an edited, peer-reviewed collection.

Please submit all proposals and correspondence via the website or email the conference convenors.

Deadline for proposals: 1st December 2012

Organisers: Ruth Ahnert (QMUL), Tamara Atkin (QMUL), Francis Leneghan (Oxford)

Returning to Oz: The Afterlife of Dorothy

Thursday 7 February 2013
International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, United Kingdom

Registration is now open: please visit the Hic Dragones website for more information.

Programme

9.30-10.00 Registration

10.00-11.00 Keynote Paper: Geoff Ryman (University of Manchester)
Harrowing the Land of the Dead: Oz, Was and Joseph Campbell

11.00-11.30 Coffee

11.30-1.00 If I Only Had a Heart: Storytelling and Oz
Chair: TBC

Matthew Freeman (University of Nottingham): Across the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz as the Historical Origins of Transmedia Storytelling

Hannah Priest (Hic Dragones/University of Manchester): The Once and Future Dorothy: Intertextuality in Tin Man

Alexander Berezkin (Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok): Dorothy Gale and her twin Ellie Smith in a magical land of the USSR

Dee Michel (Independent Researcher): Gay Folkloric Beliefs About the MGM Film and Judy Garland

1.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-3.30 If I Only Had a Brain: Theorizing Oz
Chair: TBC

Johanna Schorn (University of Cologne): “Just you and I / Defying Gravity”: A Queer Reading of Wicked

Ashley Wilson (University of Cambridge): East or West, Home is Best: Using Place/Space Theory to Identify the 1939 Wizard of Oz as the True ‘American Fairy Tale’

Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (Manchester Metropolitan University): The Oz you haven’t see before!’: The Gothic Sublime in Return to Oz (1985)

3.30-4.00 Coffee

4.00-5.30 If I Only Had the Nerve: Merit and Madness
Chair: TBC

Maria Cohut (University of Warwick): The Grotesque and the Sinister in The Wizard of Oz: Perpetuating Christian Models of Merit

Karen Graham (University of Aberdeen): ‘Now what are we going to do about Dorothy?’: The Judgement of Dorothy in Gregory Maguire’s The Wicked Years series

Carys Crossen (University of Manchester): We’re off to See the Psychiatrist: Madness, Feminine Symbols and Female Power in Disney’s Return to Oz

5.30-5.45 Short Break 5.45-6.45 Special Guest (via Skype): Gregory Maguire (tbc)

6.45 Conference Close

For more information about the conference, or to register, visit the Hic Dragones website or email the conference convenors.

Saturday, 17 November 2012

CFP: New Perspectives on the Gothic in the Age of Terror(ism): The Horror? The Horror!

A special issue of Gothic Studies journal

This special issue will examine what happens to the Gothic as a literary and filmic genre along its main thematic lines in the post 9/11 era and its age of terror(ism):

• the staging of the Other (the irrational, the monstrous, the uncanny)
• the staging of death and violence (light vs. darkness, good vs. evil, tragic vs. abject)
• the staging of community and the social (including the border and the law)
• the instability of the modern subject

1. What ‘happens’ to these themes? How are they modified? altered? Has 9/11 and the pervasive sense of global terror changed our understanding of terror? What about the place of capitalism and the crisis? What images and protagonists has this new Gothic proposed in what can be called an ‘imagination’ of disaster?

2. What new fears are being addressed and represented by the Gothic, including visually within the cinema and in the recent proliferation of television series? What loss? What guilt?

3. What is the place of race and ethnicity in this epistemological landscape? Can the concepts of ‘mimicry’ (Bhabha) and ‘differAnce’ (Derrida) be used to revisit the theoretical foundations of the Gothic? Can we talk about a ‘racial Gothic’ as Leonardo Cassuto spoke of a ‘racial grotesque’?

4. The case of the Southern Gothic, and the encounter with what has been left at the margin, could be explored within the theoretical framework proposed by Kristeva in the Powers of Horror, by Anzaldúa in Borderlands or by Agamben in Homo Sacer. Can we also talk about a New Southern Gothic?

5. How does the Gothic engage with religion in our increasingly secular and yet religiously polarized world?

6. What happens to the question of ‘knowledge’?

7. How does the commercial success and mainstreaming of Gothic in the last decade affect its ability to figure terror and resistance to terror?

8. How has the Gothic responded to the constant state of war since 2001? What about the weaponization of various technologies, including video games? How have drones, Predators, Reapers and other mechanized death machines impacted the Gothic imagination?

9. How have Gothic texts outside of the US responded to the attack on the World Trade Center and America’s militarized and violent response? How does Canadian Gothic position itself in relation to the politics of post-9/11 America? What about Mexican or South American Gothic?

10. How have new technologies impacted the literary or visual Gothic? For example, the explosion of hand-held camera horror films, night vision sequences and closed-circuit video imagery?

Proposals (500 words) and brief CVs should be addressed to both editors of the volume by 1 June 2013.

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (University of Lausanne) and Marie Lienard-Yeterian (Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis)

Thursday, 15 November 2012

OUT NOW: Feminism and Psychology, 22:4 (Nov 2012)



Table of Contents

Articles

Julie L Nagoshi, Stephan/ie Brzuzy, and Heather K Terrell
Deconstructing the complex perceptions of gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation among transgender individuals

Ursula Lau and Garth Stevens
Textual transformations of subjectivity in men’s talk of gender-based violence

Heather AK Jacques and H Lorraine Radtke
Constrained by choice: Young women negotiate the discourses of marriage and motherhood

Alexandra Gibson and Catriona Macleod
(Dis)allowances of lesbians’ sexual identities: Lesbian identity construction in racialised, classed, familial, and institutional spaces

Making a difference

Breanne Fahs
Breaking body hair boundaries: Classroom exercises for challenging social constructions of the body and sexuality

Brief reports

Katie M Edwards, Christina M Dardis, and Christine A Gidycz
Women’s disclosure of dating violence: A mixed methodological study

Daniela Petrassi
‘For me, the children come first’: A discursive psychological analysis of how mothers construct fathers’ roles in childrearing and childcare

Observation and commentaries

Virginia Braun
Petting a snake? Reflections on feminist critique, media engagement and ‘making a difference’

Petra Boynton
Getting the press we deserve: Opportunities and challenges for innovative media practice

Book reviews

Breanne Fahs
Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson, Anarchism and Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships, and Power

Elin Weiss
Carol Gilligan, Joining the Resistance, Polity Press: Cambridge

Wendy Hollway
Alison Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity

Matt Murdoch and Jenna MacKay
Andrew McKinlay and Chris McVittie, Identities in Context: Individuals and Discourse in Action

Hannah Priest
Jacqueline Rose, The Jacqueline Rose Reader, ed. Justin Clemens and Ben Naparstek

Gemma Anne Yarwood
Rachel Thomson, Mary Jane Kehily, Lucy Hadfield and Sue Sharpe, Making Modern Mothers

Maria Papadima
Barbara Almond, The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood

Jennifer M Haley
Kim Q Hall (ed.), Feminist Disability Studies

Catriona Macleod
A Rutherford, R Capdevila, V Undurti and I Palmary (eds), Handbook of International Feminisms: Perspectives on Psychology, Women, Culture and Rights

Notices

Thank you to our reviewers

Call for papers

Call for papers

For more information, please visit the journal's website.

OUT NOW: Variant Spelling Kindle Edition

And also at long last... my debut poetry collection is now available on Kindle (UK and US)

I sigh, but it’s not from frustration
But because I think that you’ve forgotten
that sometimes punctuation
just reminds us when to breathe.




Hannah Kate is a North Manchester-based poet, author and editor. Her work has appeared in a number of local and national magazines, as well as an anthology published by Crocus Books. She is a freelance teacher of English, Maths and Creative Writing, and reviews genre fiction and academic writing for a number of organizations. This is her first full-length collection of poetry.

“Delicate and strong, Hannah’s words beautifully communicate the impossibilities of communication. She explores the subtexts of what we do with our language in ways that will resonate with anyone who finds their own feelings and intents too big for semi colons.”
Dominic Berry, Poet

“The poems in Variant Spelling evoke a North in revolt; a place of abandoned dyeworks, soot, winter, granite and grease. Through the ‘shifting vowels’ of the title poem they celebrate a world at odds with the imposed culture of the South. It is at its most rebellious in Praise God, where Hannah ‘praises the God of the North’, a place where the ‘air hangs with burning witches’.”
Rosie Lugosi, Poet and Performer

For more information, please visit the Hic Dragones website.

To order, visit Amazon UK or Amazon US.

CFP: Gender and Transgression in the Middle Ages

2nd - 4th May 2013

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for Gender and Transgression in the Middle Ages 2013, a three-day interdisciplinary conference for postgraduate and early career researchers hosted by The University of St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies (SAIMS). Now in its fifth year, the conference aims to create a lively and welcoming forum for speakers to present their research, make contacts, and participate in creative discussion on the topics of gender and transgression in the Middle Ages.

This year’s keynote speaker will be Professor Pauline Stafford, Emeritus Professor in Early Medieval History at the University of Liverpool, who will be speaking on reading gender in chronicles, with special reference to the old English vernacular. We invite postgraduate, postdoctoral and early career researchers from departments of History, Modern and Mediaeval Languages, English, Art History, Theology and Divinity, in addition to scholars working in any other relevant subject area, to submit a paper of approximately 20 minutes that engage with the themes of gender and/or transgression in the mediaeval period. Possible topics for papers might include, but are by no means limited to gender and/or transgression in the fields of:

• Politics: kingship, queenship, the nobility, royal/noble household, royal favourites and mistresses, royal ritual, display and chivalry.

• Legal Studies: men, women and the law, court cases, law-breaking, marriage and divorce.

• Social and economic history: urban and rural communities, domestic household, motherhood and children, widows, working women, prostitution and crime.

• Religion: monastic communities, saints and saints' lives, mysticism and lay religion.

• Literature: chivalric texts, romances, poetry, vernacular works.

• Visual culture: depictions, architecture, art, material culture and patronage.

• Masculinity and femininity in the middle ages and their application in current historiography.

• Homosexuality, sexual deviancy and cross-dressing.

To mark the launch of St Andrews Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature (CMEMLL) we shall be holding a session on medieval law and literature within the broader conference theme of gender and transgression and therefore particularly welcome papers within this field.

Those wishing to give a paper please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to the conference convenors by Monday 11 February 2013. Your abstract should be attached to your email as a Microsoft Word or PDF file and include your name, home institution and what stage of your postgraduate or postdoctoral career you are currently at.

Registration for the conference will be £5 for students/unwaged, £10 for staff, which will cover tea, coffee and lunch on two days, and two wine receptions. All delegates are also warmly invited to the conference meal on Friday 3 May, the cost of which will be covered for speakers. Further details can be found at our website as they come available and we can be followed on Twitter.