CFP: ‘Crossroads’, Toulouse June 2012
Crossroads: an International Conference
Toulouse, France – 7-8 June 2012
Deadline for proposals: 6 January 2011
Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.
William Blake, MS Note-Book.
“Stimulating though these lines may be, one may wonder why – or indeed if – Blake is right. This conference will explore sites (whether virtual or real) where different elements come into contact, where ideas, people, and objects circulate and where transformations occur. This call for papers invites scholars in every field of English Studies to contribute papers to a conference on the theme of Crossroads.
The members of the Toulouse-based research centre Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes (CAS) welcome responses of every kind to the question of what happens when minds or ideas meet, materially or immaterially. What strange alchemy of space and time makes some meetings momentous, and others not?”
Responses will be in the form of 20 minute papers. It is strongly recommended that these be in English, but papers in French will be considered. 150-word propositions should be sent by January 6, 2011, to the organizers of the conference:
- Philippe Birgy birgy@univ-tlse2.fr
- Helen Goethals helen.goethals@orange.fr
- Wendy Harding harding@univ-tlse2.fr
Call for Papers: ‘The Famed and the Forgotten’ Postgraduate Conference
The Famed and The Forgotten
English Graduate Conference
10 June 2011
English Faculty, University of Oxford
“How are the famed forgotten and how do the forgotten become famed? How are fame, infamy and anonymity broached, contested and refracted? What comprises the literary canon and what merits canonicity?
Oxford University’s English Graduate Conference, to take place 10 June 2011, will provide English postgraduates across the United Kingdom with the opportunity to explore the ideas “famed” and “forgotten” in the broadest possible terms, considering genre, methodology, materials, characters, language, periods and everything in between.”
Paper Submissions Due 1 March 2011
For more information and submission details visit:
http://graduate-conference.english.ox.ac.uk/
Tony Judt and ‘The Glory of the Rails’ (part I)
From the late Tony Judt, the first installment of a two-part essay on the immensity of the railroads.
New York Review of Books, Dec 23, 2010
“More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity. No competing form of transport, no subsequent technological innovation, no other industry has wrought or facilitated change on the scale that has been brought about by the invention and adoption of the railway. Peter Laslett once referred to “the world we have lost”—the unimaginably different character of things as they once were. Try to think of a world before the railway and the meaning of distance and the impediment it imposed when the time it took to travel from, for example, Paris to Rome—and the means employed to do so—had changed little for two millennia. Think of the limits placed on economic activity and human life chances by the impossibility of moving food, goods, and people in large numbers or at any speed in excess of ten miles per hour; of the enduringly local nature of all knowledge, whether cultural, social, or political, and the consequences of such compartmentalization…..” Read more.
