Time and again, Shakespeare demonstrates the frailty and contingency of the many historical and “imagined” communities (Anderson) that feature in his works. Many of his plays revolve around the conflict between individuals and society, depicting the bonds between friends, lovers, family members or even whole nations being put to the test by desire, jealousy, and ambition. If Shakespeare’s communities are unstable to begin with, then discussions of diversity bring to light that very instability even further. His works have been both hailed for showcasing the universality of human nature and critiqued for implicitly reinforcing a Western, Eurocentric world view. Shakespearean drama walks a fine line between incorporating diverse facets of early modern life – including gender and sexuality, race, and religion – and perpetuating insidious mechanisms of marginalisation and othering, as the fates of some of the figureheads of Shakespearean diversity, such as Shylock, Othello and Caliban, show. On Shakespeare’s stage, community and diversity are intimately but uneasily paired and expose the various ways in which “difference”, as Goran Stanivukovic writes in Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality (2017), is “based on suppression, occlusion and semantic difference of allied vocabulary” (24). Shakespeare thus makes us ponder the question “who’s in, who’s out” (King Lear 5.3.16) both in early modern times and in ours. While the dramatic representations of these conflicts are inevitably bound to the historical contexts that helped produce them, the theatre itself always had and still has the potential to renegotiate them and to newly create communities, just as it is capable of diversifying Shakespeare, and making his works more inclusive for 21st century audiences.
Amazon
Sunday, November 5, 2023
Call for Abstracts: “WHO’S IN, WHO’S OUT”: #COMMUNITY AND #DIVERSITY IN #SHAKESPEARE- Annual #Conference #German #Shakespeare Society 2024
CFA: Travel and Research Grants from the Central European History Society
The Central European History Society (CEHS) seeks applications from North American doctoral candidates (ABD) and recent PhDs (up to three years after completion of degree) in Central European history for travel and research grants up to $4,000. To be eligible, research projects must demonstrate a clear and significant connection to Central Europe and involve travel outside North America. For the purposes of this grant, “Central Europe” includes the region’s historically German-speaking lands as well as the Habsburg Empire and its successor states. All grant-related travel must be planned to take place between April 1 and December 31, 2024.
Applicants need to be members of the Central European History Society at the time of application. (Membership also includes an individual subscription to the journal Central European History: $27/print edition and $17/digital edition annually for graduate students; $42/print and $32/digital for others.) To become a member, visit https://www.cambridge.org/core/membership/cehs.
Application Procedure:
The following materials are required, and should be combined into one PDF and e-mailed to CEHSGrants@gmail.com:
- Statement of Purpose (1000-word limit), including a project title, a succinct summary of the project and its scholarly contributions, as well as a cogent explanation of how the research to be funded by the grant fits into the larger research project. If the application is a resubmission, the narrative should indicate in which ways the project has advanced since the previous application.
- Curriculum Vitae (with a clear indication of the applicant’s preferred mail and email addresses)
- Budget Statement, totaling no more than $4,000, which should estimate and itemize costs for all planned expenditures (broken out into categories, e.g. foreign transportation, local transportation, lodging, copying, etc.), in keeping with the planned itinerary.
The application and one (1) letter of reference (which the recommender should e-mail directly to CEHSGrants@gmail.com) must be received by 15 January 2024. Applicants are advised to give their recommender several weeks’ notice of their need for a letter.
For further information or inquiries about the grants (but not to submit applications), please contact the Executive Director of CEHS, Anthony Steinhoff, at cehsexecutivedirector@gmail.com.
Saturday, November 4, 2023
Call for Papers: Narratives of Land: Place, Space, and Human Identity- January 2024
Call for Papers Adaptation: Literature, Film, and Culture (Deadline Extended) -February 21-24, 2024
Proposal submission deadline: Extended to November 14, 2023
Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 45th annual SWPACA conference. One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels.
The Adaptation: Literature, Film, and Culture area invites you to submit proposals for presentations that critically engage with the subject of adaptation. While the term “adaptation” most commonly refers to a film based upon or inspired by a novel (or the process of developing such a film), proposals for adaptations involving other media as source texts or final products are also welcome (for example, adaptations that involve art, theater, music, dance, television shows, video games, photographs, or comic books). Topics for paper proposals include, but are not limited to:
All proposals must be submitted through the conference’s database at http://register.southwestpca.org/southwestpca
For details on using the submission database and on the application process in general, please see the Proposal Submission FAQs and Tips page at http://southwestpca.org/conference/faqs-and-tips/.
Individual proposals for 15-minute papers must include an abstract of approximately 200-500 words. Including a brief bio in the body of the proposal form is encouraged, but not required.
For information on how to submit a proposal for a roundtable or a multi-paper panel, please view the above FAQs and Tips page.
Amy S. Fatzinger, Ph.D.
Friday, November 3, 2023
Call for Papers: #Folklore and Popular Culture Area -March 2024
- Folklore in Popular Culture/Folklore as Popular Culture
- Folklore and digital media
- Influence of folklore on other forms of culture (literature, film, music, etc.)
- Folklore and Religion
- Folklore and Material Culture
- The difference between oral and literary sources of tradition
- Folklore and Gender
- Folklore and children
- Uses of folklore
- Folklore and Globalism/Regionalism/Localism
- Illustrators/Illustrations of and in folklore
- Folklore and memory/memory studies
- Symbolism in folklore
- The relationship between folklore and fairy tale studies/literary studies/anthropology
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Call for Papers: Academic Conference on Terminator @40: Origins and Legacies
An academic conference hosted by The Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studies, Bangor University, Wales
18 & 19 June 2024
The Terminator franchise has left an indelible mark on popular culture. In 1984, James Cameron’s dark vision of the future created a cultural shock that continues to resonate to this day not only in cinema but also in literature, art, design, gaming, and critical theory and is even credited with having spawned several aesthetic trends, such as tech-noir. What started as a film has now become a multi-media universe consisting of sequels, a television series, web series, comics, video games, board games, novels and theme park rides. The franchise is also frequently cited in debates related to multinational corporations, robotics, biopolitics, post- and transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and nuclear apocalypse.
Hosted by the Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studies at Bangor University in North Wales, this symposium proposes to bring together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds – such as cultural and screen studies; the history of art, design, fashion and architecture; musicology; philosophy; political sciences; computer science and robotics; literature; urban and ecological studies; and race, gender, queer and sexuality studies - to explore The Terminator forty years after its release, explore its origins and legacies and consider its position within wider visual culture.
We welcome contributions from any perspective such as (but not limited to) the following:
Terminator and its origins, influences, production, publicity, reception and afterlife
Terminator and aesthetics
Terminator and biopolitics, posthumanism and urban planning.
Terminator and capitalism, neoliberalism, post-industrialism and multinational corporations
Terminator and design
Terminator and ecological studies
Terminator and fandom and ‘cult’
Terminator and gender
Terminator and James Cameron
Terminator’s multi-media franchise (sequels, television, web series, comic books, video games, board games, novels and theme park rides)
Terminator and psychoanalysis
Terminator and race, ethnicity and/or the “Other”
Terminator and robotics, artificial intelligence, cybernetic organisms, the transhuman and post-human
Terminator and sci-fi
Terminator and sexuality
Terminator and stardom
Terminator and tech noir, retrofuturism, future noir, and cyberpunk.
We are applying for funding to facilitate postgraduate and unwaged participation.
Please submit an abstract here by 1 March 2024.
For further information, please contact the organisers Professor Nathan Abrams (Bangor University) and Dr Elizabeth Miller (Bangor University) at TerminatorConference@gmail.com
Best,
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
INTERNATIONAL #CONFERENCE ON #MEMORY #STUDIES -DEPARTMENTS OF ENGLISH AND HISTORY LORETO COLLEGE, #KOLKATA- February, 2024)
CONCEPT NOTE:
Memory studies is a multidisciplinary field which combines intellectual strands from literature, history, philosophy, psychology and sociology, among others. Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896), Paul RicÅ“ur’s Memory, History and Forgetting (2004), French historian Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory (1996) and Jacques Le Goff’s History and Memory (1992) have inspired much research in the area of memory studies. Memory can be both an individual phenomenon as well as societal and collective. Forms of remembering operate as individual and collective representations of the past and they constitute a range of cultural resources for personal, social and historical identities, privileging particular readings of the past and subordinating others. Collective memory can serve as a therapeutic practice for a community and its members, as it comprises an active constructive process during which the members of a community participate in interpreting and processing shared past experiences (particularly traumas) into eventual memory representations, often in such forms as narratives, dramatizations, art, and ritual. Literature thus forms an important medium of cultural memory. The mass media plays a key role in the constitution of memory – and the politics of remembering is intrinsically connected to power. The act of remembering, whether involving individual, socio-historical or cultural representations of the past, is a process which involves selections, absences and multiple, potentially conflicting accounts. Memories are part of a larger process of dynamic cultural negotiation involving history and literature, which defines memories as narratives, and as fluid and mediated cultural and personal traces of the past. In the modern world, then, memory is an important means of establishing authority or destabilising grand narratives of history and power, of evoking nostalgia and helping to forge personal and national identity.
The conference will seek to address issues such as the following:
How do we represent the past to ourselves and to others? Which of our many pasts do we represent, and when, where, and why do we change those representations? How do those representations shape our actions, identities, and understandings? How do individual-level processes interact with collective ones, and vice versa? What does it mean to think about “memory” in these broad ways? In what ways are we ethically and politically obligated to remember, and what are the consequences of forgetting or failing to meet these obligations?
Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Stef Craps (University of Ghent, Belgium)
Dr. Abhishek Parui (IIT Madras)
Special Plenary Sessions:
Dr. Itay Lotem (University of Westminster, London)
Ms. Roberta Bacic (Founder of Conflict Textiles, Northern Ireland)
We invite paper submissions of 15-20 minutes duration from scholars whose work addresses topics including, but not limited to the following fields:
- Memory and oral history
- Contested histories and memory
- Memory, memorials, the visual arts, archives, installations
- Landscape and memory
- Memory and trauma (slavery, Partition, World Wars, Holocaust, Irish conflict, genocide, apartheid, 9/11, pandemic etc)
- Literature and nostalgia
- Memory and the diaspora
- Memory and the Media
- Collective Memory
- Cultural Memory
To submit a proposal, please send abstracts to conferencememorystudies@gmail.com
Please include the following in one PDF:
Paper presenters will be informed by 15 November, 2023.
Conference Convenor: Sukanya Dasgupta
Co-Convenor: Suparna Ghosh
Head of the Organizing Committee: Srijita Chakravarty
Following the conference, a selection of papers will be chosen by the organizers for inclusion in a proposed edited volume.