TRANSFORMERS: all that is solid changes into something else INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON  PRACTICES AND MEMES IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA & CULTURE Department of Languages and Cultures University of Aveiro, Portugal 29, 30 June & 1 July 2017 Keynote addresses by: Roz Kaveney, Author and Activist Toby Miller, University of California Riverside & Loughborough University London The movement of narratives and characterisations across forms, conventionally understood as adaptation, has been commonly carried out from the high-status classical forms (drama, epic, novel) to recorded and broadcast media (film, radio and television), or from the older recorded media to the newer ones. The advent of new convergent digital platforms has further transformed hierarchies. Now source texts can move in any direction and take up any configuration, as emergent interacting fan bases drive innovation and new creative and commercial possibilities are deployed. “Transformers” is the guiding metaphor for this conference, as the Transformers toy franchise […]

Ecology, Economy, and Cultures of Resistance: Oikoi of the North American World A two-day symposium at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. 29-30 June 2017 Ecology and economy are inextricable. From the ‘oeconomy of nature’ theorised by Thomas Burnet, and later Carl Linnaeus, to the recent turn in the social sciences that reconsiders the Anthropocene as the Capitalocene, the interwoven global history of these two fields of thought makes their conceptual separation impracticable. This two-day symposium considers the roles of cultural production and critique under these conditions of inextricability. It takes as its locus the North American world. We use the term North American world to denote the world-view as conceived by or through North American social conditions, governance, cultures, politics, and institutions, but which is global in its influences and effects. Scholars working in Anglophone universities, primarily in the United States, have dominated discussions […]

Call for Conference Papers The Course of Empires:  American-Italian Cultural Relations, 1770-1980 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. This international conference will examine the persistent fascination of American and Italian artists with the cultural achievements of ancient Rome and the Renaissance.  In creating national identities, both countries turned to history for similar reasons:  to find inspiration for enlightened political practices; to locate models of artistic, political, and economic preeminence; and to seek ways to ward off imperial decadence and decline.  Yet alongside this tendency toward emulation, some American and Italian artists looked askance at the myths of antique and Renaissance glories, demonstrating a skepticism toward the notion of imperial greatness. They utilized imagery of the Roman Colosseum, for example, as a multivalent symbol to articulate the rise, grandeur, terrors, and fall of empire. This conference seeks to update and broaden our understanding of American-Italian cultural relations from the Revolutionary Era […]

The Reading Interdisciplinary Research Network for the Study of Political History and Politics in the Americas launch conference University of Reading 2 May, 2017 PRESIDENT TRUMP’S FIRST 100 DAYS Keynote Address: Professor Andrew Rudalevige, Bowdoin College The newly established Interdisciplinary Research Network for the Study of Political History and Politics in the Americas at the University of Reading is pleased to invite proposals for panels and papers for a one day conference on President Donald J. Trump’s first 100 days. We welcome papers (fully developed or in the early stages) on all aspects of the new administration but also historical perspectives and comparative analyses of the Office of the Presidency during its first 100 days. Please send a brief CV and a summary of the proposed paper or panel (no more than three speakers per panel and 300 words per abstract, please) by March 1, 2017 to the conference organisers: […]

Call for Papers/Call for Art “The Summer of Love”: A One-Day Countercultural Event in Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Summer of 1967 Queen’s University Belfast, 28 July 2017 The Summer of Love was not simply an American phenomenon but an occurrence with international and intercultural influence and significant social and political effects, transforming the ways in which the counterculture, intergenerational relationships, class, gender, and race are understood. Thousands of young people ventured to the Bay Area, particularly the Haight-Ashbury district. The media’s overage of the influx of students, hippies, and others considered part of the “counterculture” drew national and international attention. This event will consist of a strong arts and entertainment component. The interdisciplinary focus of the newly formed School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s will be stressed as collaborative research projects in writing, poetry, film, and a number of other disciplines will highlight cooperative learning […]

South Carolina State University’s Department of English and The South Carolina Project on Language and Culture (SCPLC) will host an inter-disciplinary Conference on October  6, 2017. Conference Theme:  America’s southern cultures and identities:  language, customs, literature. The organizing committee is soliciting proposals for 20-minute presentations on topics related to language, culture, dialects, literature, film, communities, and other  areas that highlight research and documentation studies on  South Carolina’s cultures and languages as well as Southern regional cultures, languages and communities.  Please send a 250-300 word abstract by March 1, 2017.  Please send it via email to ssalone@scsu.edu.  Please send the following information with the abstract. Name and affiliation of the presenter. Email address Title of the presentation. Abstract (approximately 250-300 words) AV equipment requests, if any. Possible topic areas: Southern Regional Cultures Southern Regional literatures South Carolina literatures African-American Cultures European ethnic communities of The South Caucasian-American communities of The South Hispanic […]

The International Ralph Ellison Symposium September 28-30, 2017 Oxford University The Rothermere American Institute (www.rai.ox.ac.uk) at the University of Oxford and the Ralph Ellison Society (https://ellisonsociety.wordpress.com) are pleased to announce the first International Ralph Ellison Symposium. The symposium will bring together Ellison scholars and readers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other international locales. The symposium will explore a variety of themes vital to Ellison’s life and work, in particular the relevance that his self-fashioned American and African-American identity has around the world. The likely session topics include: Ellison in translation (Invisible Man is in print in more than twenty different languages, including a Mandarin edition published in 2016). The reception, past and present, of Ellison’s fiction and essays in different countries. The status and future direction of Ellison scholarship. Ellison’s own engagement with the world: for example, his urge (thwarted by tonsillitis) to fight in the Abraham […]

The International Ralph Ellison Symposium September 28-30, 2017 Oxford University The Rothermere American Institute (www.rai.ox.ac.uk) at the University of Oxford and the Ralph Ellison Society (https://ellisonsociety.wordpress.com) are pleased to announce the first International Ralph Ellison Symposium. The symposium will bring together Ellison scholars and readers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other international locales. The symposium will explore a variety of themes vital to Ellison’s life and work, in particular the relevance that his self-fashioned American and African-American identity has around the world. The likely session topics include: Ellison in translation (Invisible Man is in print in more than twenty different languages, including a Mandarin edition published in 2016). The reception, past and present, of Ellison’s fiction and essays in different countries. The status and future direction of Ellison scholarship. Ellison’s own engagement with the world: for example, his urge (thwarted by tonsillitis) to fight in the Abraham […]

Surveillance, Race, Culture Call for Papers Dr Susan Flynn, University of Arts, London. s.flynn@lcc.arts.ac.uk Dr Antonia Mackay, Oxford Brookes University Oxford. antoniamackay@brookes.ac.uk Drawing on huge interest in the upcoming collection Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves which is currently in press this new collection seeks to merge cultural explorations of surveillance with the issue of race. We wish to examine how culture produces or reproduces power relations via the surveillant technologies which have captured the cultural imagination. Through a critical reading of contemporary and historic narratives of race and surveillance, we seek to illustrate the ongoing cultural fascination with technologies of control and surveillance. The current global moment is one of extreme cultural upheaval; political populism, the ‘alt right’ and the greatest movement of peoples since World War 2 are coupled with the increasing salience of surveillant technologies and regimes. At this juncture in history, with exclusionary policies, increasing racism […]

Trump’s America Clinton Institute for American Studies University College Dublin 5-6 May 2017 Call for Papers This conference will examine the political and cultural significance of Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, and consider the first 100 days of his administration. Speakers include: Robert Brigham (Vassar College), Scott Lucas (University of Birmingham/EAWorldview), Diane Negra (University College Dublin), Inderjeet Parmar (City, University of London), Donald E. Pease (Dartmouth College). Topics may include but are not confined to: “Make America Great Again” – American exceptionalism, nostalgia “America First” – foreign policy and diplomacy “Protect our borders” – immigration and terrorism “Drain the swamp” - Washington elites, lobbying and corruption “A historic movement” – white nationalism, identity politics, protest “American carnage” – dystopian visions of the US, narratives of decline “Crime and gangs and guns” – race and the cities, gun violence, civic anxiety “Fake news” – politics in the […]

Winning the Western Approaches: Unrestricted Submarine Warfare and the US Navy in Ireland, 1917-18 University College Cork 5 – 7 July 2017 Industrial warfare during the First World War extended underwater, as submarines destroyed up to 5,000 vessels and altered the course of the conflict. Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917 brought the United States into the war and created severe Allied shipping losses and dangerous food shortages. A transatlantic convoy system introduced that year relied heavily on US Navy escort vessels based in Ireland and France. These American escorts helped bring Allied shipping losses under control and protect troop ships packed with American soldiers bound for France. The American naval presence in Europe contributed to the final defeat of the Central Powers and announced the arrival of a new military power. This multi-disciplinary conference will explore the consequences of underwater warfare during the First World War, […]

Theorising the Popular Conference 2017 Liverpool Hope University, June 21st-22nd 2017 The Popular Culture Research Group at Liverpool Hope University is delighted to announce its seventh annual international conference, ‘Theorising the Popular’. Building on the success of previous years, the 2017 conference aims to highlight the intellectual originality, depth and breadth of ‘popular’ disciplines, as well as their academic relationship with and within ‘traditional’ subjects. One of its chief goals will be to generate debate that challenges academic hierarchies and cuts across disciplinary barriers. The conference invites submissions from a broad range of disciplines, and is particularly interested in new ways of researching ‘popular’ forms of communication and culture. In addition to papers from established and early career academics, we encourage proposals from postgraduate taught and research students. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: Film and Television Media and Communication Politics and Populism Celebrity Literature (Fiction and Non-Fiction) Music […]