‘Tagore: The Global Impact of a Writer in the Community’
International Tagore Conference ‘Tagore: The Global Impact of a Writer in the Community’
Edinburgh Napier University
4, 5 and 6 May 2012
Proposals Due: 31 October 2011
The conference is held under the aegis of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs) being established as part of the Centre for Literature and Writing (CLAW).
Ashis Nandy has said that Tagore embodies the modern consciousness of India (Illegitimacy of Nationalism, 1998) and this year India celebrates Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary.
Tagore forged friendships with leading thinkers and cultural figures of his day, including Einstein, G. B. Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Gandhi. He had a particular connection with Scotland: his grandfather, Prince Dwarkanath Tagore, was given the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh in 1845 and Rabindranath’s friendship and collaboration with Patrick Geddes led to the realization of their vision for International Universities.
Tagore’s impact was international and interdisciplinary. However, his reputation in the West has been overlooked in recent decades. This conference addresses that oversight and projects Tagore’s legacy into the global arena:
You were a designer in every fold of existence
Your robes a syncretic weave of fakir and sage
Your houses were shaped by a multicultural essence
And every genre you touched reached the ultimate stage
Of achievement. The time has come, Poet, to acknowledge
Our measureless debt to you and share your borderless knowledge.
From ‘Rabindranath’, by Bashabi Fraser
The conference invites papers exploring Tagore’s literary and artistic output and welcomes presentations that evaluate his community and educational projects and assess his global impact in his time and today. Papers are also welcome on Tagore’s literary output, art, poetry, and ideas about community projects and global peace. Topics for papers include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Tagore and Literature
- Tagore and the Environment/Ecology
- Tagore and Modernism/Modernity
- Tagore and the Renaissance/Enlightenment
- Tagore and Postcolonialism/Cosmopolitanism
- Tagore and Scotland/Scottish Studies/Irish-Scottish Studies
- Tagore and Geddes
- Tagore and Education
- Tagore and the West
- Tagore and India/and the Indian community in Europe
- Tagore and his Circle
- Tagore and Gender Politics
- Tagore’s Legacy
Proposals of 250 words should be submitted by 31 October 2011. Please send proposals, plus a one-paragraph biography, as Word document or PDF to scots@napier.ac.uk
For further information, please contact scots@napier.ac.uk
Conference organisers:
Dr Bashabi Fraser, Lecturer in English and Creative Writing
Dr Scott Lyall, Lecturer in Modern Literature
Dr Emily Alder, Research Assistant
Centre for Literature and Writing
Edinburgh Napier University
Extended CFP: Rural Geographies
Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840-1920
23rd September 2011, University of Warwick
*CFP DEADLINE EXTENDED – 15th AUGUST*
Whilst discussions of gender and space in the nineteenth- to early-twentieth century have typically focused on “women and the city”, rural spaces offer equally productive contexts for exploring the intersections between gender and space in this period. As the socio-spatial relations of the country are impacted by the move into modernity, rural environments are revealed in literary and historical texts as sites of complex, contradictory and changing gendered codes.
This half-day symposium offers a long-overdue forum in which to resituate the rural as a vital context for understanding the meanings of gender and space in this period. By bringing together scholars from different disciplinary perspectives we aim to understand the diverse experiences of gendered rural spaces and contribute to discussions about theoretical approaches to the (rural)space-gender intersection.
Proposals are invited for short papers from scholars in literary studies, history, geography, and any other discipline; postgraduate and early career researchers are especially encouraged to apply. Themes for discussion could include:
- theories of gender and rural place: what do we mean by rural space, how do we theorise “the rural” as a spatial context, and how does gender intersect?
- the impact of modernity;
- mobility: walking, vagabonds, pedestrians, wayward women;
- labour, class and gender in the country;
- masculinities;
- different ruralities;
- visibility/ invisibility
Please send a 300-word proposal for 15 minute papers to the conference organisers Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson
Gemma.Goodman@warwick.ac.uk and c.e.mathieson@warwick.ac.uk
CFP – Researching the Colonial Archive Training Day 19 September
Researching The Colonial Archive
A Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World Leverhulme Network Training Day
Monday 19 September 2011
Natural History Museum, London
10am-5pm
Applications Due: 2 September 2011
With Sarah Easterby-Smith (European University Institute), Clare Pettitt (King’s College London), Josephine McDonagh (King’s College London), Julie Harvey (NHM), Polly Parry (NHM), James Hodgkin (NHM) and Miranda Lowe (NHM)
Supported by the Centre for Art and Humanities Research, Natural History Museum, and the Leverhulme Cambridge Victorian Studies Group
Designed around the excellent collections of the Natural History Museum this event focuses on textual history, visual culture and the methodological issues collection based research might raise: it will also include collection visits and experience with archival materials. We will consider, amongst other things, the material histories of post-colonial texts, reading ‘the visual’, the idea of the colonial archive and the politics of collecting. Refreshments and lunch will be provided; there will also be a small amount of preparatory reading required. Places will be limited to 15 to enable close access to collection items.
For more information and details on how to apply see:
http://www.commoditiesandculture.org/events/researching-the-colonial-archive-training-days.html
(Bursaries are available for travel within the UK)
CFP: Literature Compass: Global Hardy
“The point of cross-cultural comparison is not to reify the reassuring opposition between two distinct identities but to force each side to ask: could we understand ourselves otherwise in the other’s terms?” (908) Hon Lam, Ling and Dahlia Porter. “Hybrid Commodities, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Challenge of Cross-Cultural Comparison: A Response to Moretti’s ‘The Novel: History and Theory’” 7.9 (2010)
“Literature Compass invites submissions of articles of 5,000 words (excluding notes and bibliography) to a cluster/special issue on Global Hardy. Submissions will be peer reviewed through Literature Compass’s normal scholarly channels. The issue will develop a historical perspective and, in keeping with the Global Circulation Project (http://literature-compass.com/global-circulation-project/), it will focus on areas outside Europe and North America. Exploring the reception and circulation of Hardy it will look at ways in which Hardy’s ideas have been received, and circulated, globally – Japan, for example, has a Hardy society older than Britain’s – asking why Hardy has been, or is, so popular outside Europe and North America.
Submissions should be sent to Dr Angelique Richardson at A.Richardson@exeter.ac.uk by 1st July 2012, for final submission in December 2012.
The Global Circulation Project is a global map and dialogue on how key Anglophone works, authors, genres, and literary movements have been translated, received, imitated/mimicked, adapted, or syncretised outside Britain, Europe, and North America, and, conversely, how key works from outside these areas have been translated, received, imitated/mimicked, adapted, or syncretised within Anglophone literary traditions. It asks, what forms of intertextuality, reception, etc. are generated through cultural contact? Guo Ting’s article on Byron in China http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00727.x/full (contact A.Richardson@exeter.ac.uk for a copy if you are not at a subscribing institution) offers an example of the scope of the Global Circulation project.
All submissions must include full scholarly apparatus for notes (we follow MLA style, with in-text references and a Works Cited). We apologize in advance to the scholarly community that at this time we are only able to consider submissions and responses in English; this may change as the dialogue and network grow.
Because our intellectual priority is to promote a global circulation of ideas in the present as well as to study such circulations in the past, we ask our readers to read differently, to welcome the difficulty of reading unfamiliar inflections and entering unfamiliar critical frames. For, even as articles are published in English, we practice an editorial policy flexible enough to foster communication across languages and scholarly traditions. Our goal is to allow differences in style and approach to be heard, as much as is possible, across linguistic and cultural differences, so as to generate new international dialogues.”
More information on Literature Compass can be found at http://literature-compass.com/
CFP: Masculinity Studies
Call For Papers
Masculinity Studies: An Interdisciplinary Workshop,
Tuesday 20 September 2011, University of Warwick
The purpose of this workshop is to bring together scholars from across the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in order to explore how issues of masculinity have informed their research. It aims to highlight the importance of masculinity as a category of analysis, and to provide postgraduates, postdoctoral researchers, and academic staff with an interdisciplinary forum through which to discuss their particular research interests, methodology, and to reflect on future directions for masculinity studies.
Participants will be invited to deliver a short paper discussing their research. The workshop is interdisciplinary, and therefore papers from any academic discipline are welcomed. Postgraduate and early career researchers are especially encouraged to apply. If you would like to participate, please email a proposal and a brief CV by 9 August 2011 to: S.A.Lussana@warwick.ac.uk
Call for Contributions: ‘Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture’
Call for Articles: Victorian Network Postgraduate Journal
5th issue: ‘Production and Consumption in Victorian Literature and Culture’
DEADLINE for article submissions: 15 August, 2011
The fifth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Ella Dzelzainis (Newcastle University), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century investments in concepts of productivity and consumption. Accelerating industrialisation, the growth of consumer culture, economic debates about the perils of overconsumption as well as emerging cultural discourses about industriousness, work ethic and the uses of free time radically altered the ways in which Victorians thought about practices of production and consumption. Literary authors intervened directly in these economic and social debates while also negotiating analogous developments within a literary marketplace transformed by new forms of writing, distributing and consuming literature. We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:
• Productivist and consumerist ideologies and the politics of social class
• Victorian (global) spaces of production, forms and practices of consumption
• Changing concepts of literary production, authorship and the reading audience
• Biological and physiological models of productivity, attrition and idleness
• New agents in the literary marketplace: publishers, editors, book sellers
• Economic theory and nineteenth-century literature
• Reassessing Marxist perspectives on Victorian literature and culture
• Idleness, spare time and other modes of ‘unproductiveness’
• The effects of industrialisation: mechanization, work routine and ‘human motors’
All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. Please note the extended deadline for submissions to our next issue is 15 August, 2011. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com
CFP: The Materials of Mourning: Death, Materiality and Memory in Victorian Britain
The Materials of Mourning: Death, Materiality and Memory in Victorian Britain
3 December 2011, Centre for Modern Studies, University of York
Proposals due: 15 September 2011
Keynote speaker: Marcia Pointon
‘The death of Prince Albert has turned England into a land of mourning.’
Lord Dufferin, February 1862
Timed to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Prince Albert’s death, this one-day symposium seeks to investigate how grief was manifested and mourning facilitated in the Victorian period through literature, music, performance and the visual arts. Often satirised but rarely understood, this symposium aims to recover the rich culture of mourning in the Victorian period by showcasing current research and encouraging conversation, debate and interdisciplinary exchange.
The day will conclude with a roundtable to which delegates are invited to bring an object or picture related to Victorian death culture, prompting discussion about the tangibility of grief and mourning and the impact of material culture on our own research.
We warmly invite proposals for twenty-minute papers from postgraduates and early-career researchers with backgrounds in history of art, history, literature, music, performance studies and other related humanities.
Topics for discussion may include but are not limited to:
- Ritual: ceremonies, funerals, masses, cremations.
- Commercialisation: dark tourism, souvenirs, celebrities and villains.
- Spaces of Mourning: cemeteries, churchyards, death chambers, mausolea.
- Craft and Fashion: embroidery, needlework, mourning costume and jewellery.
- Representations: death and mourning in literature, music, performance and the visual arts.
- Objects: how objects and texts were used in the mourning process (annotations, keepsakes, scrapbooks.)
- Class, Gender, Nationality: aberrant and conventional accounts of mourning from different social perspectives.
Please submit abstracts limited to 250 words to the conference organisers, Eoin Martin and Claire Wood, at materialsofmourning@gmail.com by 15 September 2011.
CFP: Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840-1920
Rural Geographies of Gender and Space, Britain 1840-1920
23 September 2011, University of Warwick
Proposals Due: 29 July 2011
Whilst discussions of gender and space in the nineteenth- to early-twentieth century have typically focused on “women and the city”, rural spaces offer equally productive contexts for exploring the intersections between gender and space in this period. As the socio-spatial relations of the country are impacted by the move into modernity, rural environments are revealed in literary and historical texts as sites of complex, contradictory and changing gendered codes.
This half-day symposium offers a long-overdue forum in which to resituate the rural as a vital context for understanding the meanings of gender and space in this period. By bringing together scholars from different disciplinary perspectives we aim to understand the diverse experiences of gendered rural spaces and contribute to discussions about theoretical approaches to the (rural)space-gender intersection.
Proposals are invited for short papers from scholars in literary studies, history, geography, and any other discipline; postgraduate and early career researchers are especially encouraged to apply. Themes for discussion could include:
- theories of gender and rural place: what do we mean by rural space, how do we theorise “the rural” as a spatial context, and how does gender intersect?
- the impact of modernity;
- mobility: walking, vagabonds, pedestrians, wayward women;
- labour, class and gender in the country;
- masculinities;
- different ruralities;
- visibility/ invisibility
Please send a 300-word proposal for 15 minute papers by 29th July to the conference organisers:
Gemma.Goodman@warwick.ac.uk and c.e.mathieson@warwick.ac.uk
