“‘The current unbroken/ the circuits kept open’: Connecting Cultures and the Commonwealth”
The 16th Triennial ACLALS Conference, St. Lucia, West Indies, August 5 –9, 2013
In “Sometimes in the Middle of the Story,” a poem that revisits the perilous event of the Middle Passage, the eminent Walcott scholar, Edward Baugh, gives primacy to the connecting currents of the “ocean” as a central motif. ..... Read more in the attached CALL FOR PAPERS, and send your abstract to
Reading the City Conference
12 October, Friday, 2012
English and American Studies Institute, University of Pannonia, Veszprém
This one-day bilingual conference aims to bring together scholars for the first academic conference initiated by the English and American Studies Institute, University of Pannonia, Veszprém, dedicated to the study of space in the humanities in the year that marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth, the writer who immortalized nineteenth-century London by contributing to the invention of urban literature and of the modern urban subject. .........
More info in the attached file or at the website of Topos Journal (switch language and click on News).
13th Biennial GASt Conference in Stuttgart, 27-29 Sept. 2012:
"Visualizing Australia: Images, Icons and Imaginations - Representing the Continent at Home and Abroad"
Please send your proposals by February 29th 2012 to:
We ask international guests who would like to attend to respond with a (preliminary) title by 15.06.2011 in order to facilitate possible funding opportunities.
Conference title: "Transculturation and Aesthetics"
Place, date: Bergen, 31. Aug. -2. Sept. 2012. Extended deadline: Abstracts due by 11 April 2012.
Contact: Anne Holden Ronning at
"Researching the Other, Transfers of Self: Ego-Histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia" International Conference, University of Paris XIII, 8-9 December 2011
Due date for abstracts and bio: 30 September 2011
Please read the call for papers in the attached and send your response to the organisers (contacts are listed in the cfp):
Vanessa Castejon, Anna Cole, Oliver Haag, Karen Hughes
11th Biennial European Association for Studies on Australia (EASA) INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE – UNIVERSITY OF PREŠOV, SLOVAKIA
SEPTEMBER 12-15, 2011
First Circular
Crossing the Borders: Reality, Desire and Imagination in Australian, New Zealand and the Pacific Lives, Literatures and Cultures
In the Humanities “Reality” has become a contested term, given its dependence on widely-differing social and cultural contexts as well as on individuals’ perceptions of material and immaterial objects and phenomena. In recent times new technologies have significantly impacted upon the ways in which realities are produced, consumed and valued. From virtual, hyperreal, simulated and photoshopped realities through re-articulation of ideas of the “natural” via genetic and reproductive technologies, the instability of the concept of reality has ironically meant that its status as an ideological battleground has often emerged more clearly.
The nature and understanding of Australian, New Zealand and Pacific realities in such contexts has become multivalent and frequently ambiguous. The representation of identities in literature, arts and the media in general have oscillated between rationalistic, mimetic and more complex postmodern understandings, the latter especially in recent decades. In the case of Australia, Paul Carter argues that Australian “social and political institutions...literary and visual culture...and [the] treatment of Australia’s indigenous people, [have] been constructed mimetically” (Carter xix). But Bill Ashcroft and John Salter understand Australia as a rhizomic text and suggest that “[w]hat we understand by ‘Australia’ or Australian social reality needs to be ‘re-imagined’, which means that the imperialistic ‘borders’ which now ‘define Australia’ must come to be understood as border ‘zones’, to accommodate the ‘hybridity’ that is a defining feature of the rhizomic text” (Ashcroft and Salter 22). In addition, Livio Dobrez, commenting on the impact of virtual reality and media on the construction of Australia adds that “Australia comes into being for us as a PR excercise, an ‘image’ of national identity, presence in the form of absence” (Dobrez 44).
With such attention focused on what was once a series of loosely-theorised assumptions, there is no going back to simple or simplistic national narratives. Nations, societies and cultures now exist multiply, necessitating the consideration of how realities are perceived, understood and represented by different constituencies. All this is well-accepted in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, but requires the factoring in of the connections between the increasingly cross-border real, imaginary and desired projections of the future generated by border-stretching media technologies and scientific discourses of the alterable and re-created self? How do these new technologies relate to the contemporary formation of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific? Do they in fact reprise the disturbances associated with earlier technological advances or do they present entirely new challenges? How do they relate to current understandings of memory as articulated in such practices as oral storytelling, truth and reconciliation commissions, the use of visual technologies to establish entitlements or records, or even the recourse to DNA testing, means of recording or re-constructing reality and the past in different genres?
This inter-disciplinary and inter-discursive conference accordingly seeks to discuss but is not limited to issues and such themes as:
• Reality, desire, and imagination in Australian, New Zealand, and the Pacific
• National-Ethnic-Gendered-Local-Migrant perceptions of reality and the future
• Crossing the borders of Identity: how real, how imaginary?
• Crossing Reality Borders – Reality as Fiction, Fiction as Reality
• Colonial, Imperial, Colonized and Native Realities, Fantasies, Dreams and Imaginations
• Reality virtual, hyper-real, simulated and media(ted)
• Memory and storytelling – how real, how imagined?
• Real, Imagined, Dreamed and Mediated Objects and Phenomena-literature, memory, story-telling, media, technology (computers, internet, facebook, DVD, cell phones...) in contemporary culture
• Real and Imagined fears of reality and of terror (ism)
• Reality, desire and imagination across the genres (realistic-modernist-fantastic-postmodern and....?)
• Reality of the Possible and Actual Worlds- Actual, Fictional, Possible and Other Worlds in Literature and Arts
• Central and East European Vision of Australian, New Zealand and the Pacific Realities
• Unified or diverse images of contemporary and future Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific?
Bibliography
Dobrez, Livio. (ed.). Identifying Australia in Postmodern Times. Canberra: ANU Press, 1994.
Carter, Paul. “Baroque Identities: Migration and Mimicry”.
Ashcroft, Bill & John Salter. “‘Australia’: A Rhizomic Text”. In Dobrez, 15-24.
Dobrez, Livio. “Being Australian: Identity, Identities and Traces of Identities”. In Dobrez, 25-46.
All these topics can be treated from interdisciplinary and/or interdiscursive perspectives,calling upon disciplinary areas such as Cultural, Gender, Indigenous, Sociology, Philosophy, Media and Film, History, Literary, Linguistics, Art or other relevant Studies. The conference will also host writers (to be announced) who will be reading from their work during the conference.
Postgraduate Seminar
One of the aims of the conference is to attract doctoral scholars from Central and Eastern Europe to exchange views on Australian, New Zealand, the Pacific and post-colonial studies in general, with a view to discussing further co-operation under the aegis of EASA.
As has become a tradition of this conference, there will be a meeting and a seminar for post-graduate students dealing with these fields of study. This is still provisional, and is based around lectures and reading specific texts. The seminar may be taken as part of university studies equivalent to a course with a particular number of credits, to be acknowledged by participants’ institutions. Doctoral students are further encouraged to present their papers at the conference (these presentations will not coincide with the seminar programme which will be conceived as a separate activity).
BOOK PRESENTATIONS, BOOK LAUNCHES, READINGS
Writers, conference participants, or representatives of publishers will have the opportunity to present their works at the conference.
Deadlines:
Please e-mail 250-word abstracts to Jaroslav Kušnír by March 30, 2011.
Acceptance of papers will be announced by April 30th, 2011
(participants requiring earlier processing may send in abstracts when ready, indicating their specific needs in this respect)
1 June, 2011 Registration (at early bird fee)
15 July, 2011 Deadline for full registration
Organizing Committee:
Jaroslav Kušnír (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Howard Wolf (State University of New York at Buffalo, USA)
Anton Pokrivčák (Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia)
Silvia Pokrivčáková (Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia)
Eva Pavličková (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Magdaléna Rázusová (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Eva Eddy (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Miloš Blahút (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Ivan Štrba (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Michal Tatarko (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
*** Conference at the University of Sydney on 13-14 January 2011 ***
The conference is titled Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia and will be hosted by Australian Literature at the University of Sydney.
(Conference Website: http://conferences.arts.usyd.edu.au/index.php?cf=32)
Conference convenors: Dr Peter Kirkpatrick and Prof Robert Dixon.
The revised date for Abstract Submission is 31 August 2010.
