Category: CFP

Announcements, BWWC, CFP

CFP for BWWC 2025 in Sioux Fall, South Dakota: Apply by Dec. 15, 2024!

Dr. Doreen Thierauf

The organizers of the 2025 British Women Writers Conference have released their full Call for Papers:

BWWC 2025 will focus on the theme “Transformations” as it relates to texts produced by women, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming individuals within global and transatlantic contexts during the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The organizers wish to consider how these texts represent, reflect, and embody transformation, as well as how they have proved and continue to prove transformative. How might the study of these texts generate transformation within the classroom, academic programs and disciplines, educational institutions, and academia at large? How might this work contribute to social, political, and ecological transformation at a time when efforts to address humanitarian and environmental crises are routinely and systematically met with resistance? What transformations must occur to ensure that the conditions of academic work are just, humane, ethical, and equitable?

See the full CFP, including submission guidelines and topic suggestions, here.

Announcements, BWWC, CFP

Full CFP for BWWC Colorado in 2024 out Now!

Dr. Doreen Thierauf

The organizers of the 2024 British Women Writers Conference have released the full Call for Papers:

The organizers of the 2024 BWWC invite papers and panel proposals related to the theme of “Reproduction(s)” in global, transatlantic, and British women’s writing from the long eighteenth century to the present. Beyond the more obvious correlation between this theme and the centrality of reproductive rights to women’s lives, a vital resonance exists between this topic and the commitment of the British Women Writers Association to recover “women/womxn from the margins to the center of literary history.” The act of recovery (and all forms of reproduction, for that matter) contains the potential for re-emergence and mutation—for moments of slippage and opportunities for change. Participants are encouraged to be especially aware of the potential for disruption embedded within the concept/practice/enactment of reproduction(s).

This year’s organizers have deliberately chosen the plural form of “reproduction” because the word is simultaneously a noun, a verb, and an adjective. Also, reproduction is both biological and technological, as seen in the reverberating effects the industrial revolution had on blurring the supposed boundaries between women’s labor, leisure, and traditional familial structures. The ways in which aesthetics and print culture reproduce these cultural tensions reveal the continual transformations and mutations of women’s roles in society.

Intimately tied to these issues are forms of familial reproduction, ranging from eighteenth-century laws regarding inheritance to the suffrage movement of the twenty-first century. While many women were embracing new roles, their self-enacted freedoms often outpaced their legal rights. This topic is especially relevant when considering that women of color who suffered because of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism had even fewer legal rights than white women of the middle and upper classes.

Of great interest are subversive methods of reproducing knowledge, for example, unsanctioned communication networks and the re-appropriation of cultural reproductions. It would be especially beneficial to have contributions that embrace alternative approaches to “reproducing” the traditional archive. In the spirit of reproduction(s), the organizers look forward to reading proposals that play with and challenge the limits of this theme.

See the full CFP, including submission guidelines and topic suggestions, here.

Announcements, BWWC, CFP

2023 BWWC CFP “Liberties” (deadline extended to Jan. 31, 2023)

Kirstyn Leuner

The organizers of the 2023 BWWC invite papers and panel proposals (UPDATE: submission deadline extended to January 31, 2023) interpreting the theme of ‘Liberties’ in global and transatlantic British women’s writing from the long eighteenth century to the present. We ask participants to consider ‘liberties’ not only as a political abstraction but also as part of material and experiential subjectivity. Interpreted broadly, liberties include (but are not limited to) legal rights and freedoms, liberty of the person and bodily autonomy, liberties of creative and artistic expression, liberty of profession and vocation, freedom of movement both physical and social, and self-determination in the private and public spheres. How far did these liberties extend to women at different historical moments? Were liberties granted by the state and other institutions or taken despite them? How were they imagined and realized differently by women across categories of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, age, ability? We invite presenters to contextualize ‘liberties’ in terms of both its capacities and practices as well as its limits and exclusions.

British history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries poses conflicting and contradictory narratives of liberty. The abolition of the slave trade did not end indentured labor in the colonies. The expansion of the franchise through legislation did not extend the vote to women and the poor. Free trade and market liberalism increased Britain’s wealth but also aggravated socioeconomic inequalities. The rhetorics of emancipation at home contrasted with the realities of imperial rule abroad. How can we make sense of these partial and conditional liberties using literary history? Whose liberty is centered in literary, historical, and political narratives? How is liberty represented in women’s writing — as aspiration, transgression, fantasy, lack? We welcome scholarship that puts the construct of liberty under critical scrutiny and interrogates its relationship to ongoing and incomplete struggles for liberation. We also welcome presentations and panel proposals on pedagogy. How can we draw connections in our teaching between literary history and the liberationist movements of the present? Short talks on pedagogical methodology, classroom practices, use of digital and other media tools, or collective and community-facing projects are highly encouraged.

Submit your CFP here: http://bwwc23.com/submission-form/

Possible topics for papers and panels include:

Political liberties

Women and nationhood, women’s civic participation, women and human rights, anti-slavery and abolition, empire and anti-colonialism, suffrage and women’s liberation

Social liberties

Women’s education, women’s work and the professions, women travelers and migration, women’s associations and societies, liberty and domesticity

Liberties of the body

Reproductive liberties, sex and sexuality, desire and consent, queer bodies, women’s physical cultures, women and disability

Liberties of expression

Gender and performance, women’s self-fashioning, women’s art and aesthetics, women and publicity, women and print culture, women’s intellectual histories

Announcements, CFP

Romantic Circles/K-SAA Anti-Racist Pedagogies Colloquium Fellowship

Kirstyn Leuner

Call for Fellows (due June 15)

RC Pedagogies and K-SAA see the work of discovering, gathering, developing, and elaborating anti-racist pedagogies as essential to the work of scholars and teachers, not to mention to the viability and relevance of the Romantic period more generally. Since systemic racism has long affected not only what texts are considered canonical, but also how, where, and to whom Romantic-era materials are taught, RC Pedagogies and K-SAA hope to provide support for scholars in expanding access to Romantic-era pedagogy, including resources for teaching in underserved communities and carceral facilities. Such an undertaking must be a collaborative, sustained, and rigorous research project to include bibliographies of available material, articles discussing best classroom practices, contextual materials, and syllabi, compiled into a readily usable/accessible set of pages to be maintained over time.

A joint team of K-SAA and RC scholars seek to appoint a team of 4 Pedagogies Fellows tasked with adding to a permanent yet expanding set of anti-racist pedagogy web links and resources begun by last year’s amazing Fellows (Mahasweta Baxipatra, Conny Cassity, Hilary Fezzy, Lenora Hanson, Indu Ohri, and Erin Saladin). The Colloquium to be held over Zoom during several meetings over four weeks during July-August 2022. Fellows would receive a $500 honorarium, and specific dates for the colloquium will be crowd-sourced by the fellows and convener. Over the course of that month, Fellows would, together and independently, locate helpful contextual sources, syllabi, articles, and techniques for anti-racist pedagogy in the Romantic period, as well as organize and annotate these items into accessible webcontent for teachers of high school, undergraduate, graduate students, and other learners.

Throughout the colloquium, Fellows will be encouraged (but not required) to share their work through online social fora like Twitter and HASTAC. At the month’s end, the group will identify future work for the participants of this colloquium and colloquia to come, which may include blogging for the K-SAA Blog, a series of short essays for RC, a conference panel, a special issue, or another form of work. (This colloquium is the second in a series of continuing work.)

Fellows will have the opportunity to build a cohort and a virtual space for discussion of anti-racist pedagogy and its intellectual work. They will also receive mentoring via senior scholar-teachers in the field via guests and speakers as well as other members of the K-SAA/RC Pedagogies team. Fellows can thus expect to become part of a widening professional network of Romantic scholars, digital humanists, and teachers, especially in their unique relationship to Romantic Circles and K-SAA as organizations with journals and other scholarly events. Additionally, Fellows will gain exposure to journal, organization, and advisory board projects.

Applicants of any rank are invited to submit a one-page letter of intent to keatshelleyassociation@gmail.com by June 15th, which discusses specific interests and experience in anti-racist pedagogy, including discussion/description of courses taught or proposed as well as scholarly research/interests and public humanities work.

image credit: https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/225445-megaphone-icons-vector

BWWC, CFP

CFP for 2022 BWWC

Kirstyn Leuner

The organizers of the 2022 BWWC invite papers and panel proposals interpreting the theme of “Borders” in global British women’s writing across the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This year’s BWWC calls for papers that contextualize that history bearing in mind changes in the field itself, as it turns towards the global and the transatlantic. “Borders” may be broadly interpreted to include scholarship concerning borders within and among scholarly disciplines, borders within form and genre, political and geographical borders, socio-economic boundaries and borders, and borders among individuals or identities, especially between and within historically marginalized racial and ethnic communities.

Continue to read the full CFP: https://sites.baylor.edu/bwwc2022/cfp/

Send abstracts to BWWC2022@baylor.edu.

“BORDERS”

Baylor University, Waco, Texas, welcomes scholars to the website for the Thirtieth Annual British Women Writers Association conference, May 19-21, 2022! The BWWC 2022 theme of “Borders” and the supporting logo encourage reflection about widening the borders of the discipline. Who is included among the writers studied? What geographic boundaries could expand to include overlooked, colonized, or misrepresented lands? How might contemporary scholars disrupt historical boundaries between literatures, people, cultures, and disciplines to uncover and make evident intersectionality?

To start the conversation and to encourage dialogue about these questions, this website offers an interactive discussion forum where association and conference participants can engage with one another in the months and days ahead of the conference. Join the discussion here.

About the Logo

The conference logo is designed with two purposes: to foreground diverse voices of women writers from the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to show, through its circular structure, a commitment to equity and welcoming. The circular “border” line around the outside of the inner circle gives the logo movement, creating the sense of borders widening. Writers represented in the logo are (from the center top, clockwise): Mary Seacole, Toru Dutt, Isabella Bird, Krupabai Satthianadan, Phillis Wheatley, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The background image is a map drawn by Shanawdithit, a member of the Beothuk people from what is now called Newfoundland. Shanawdithit (1801-1829) documented the culture of the Beothuk nation.

Announcements, CFP

CFP NASSR 2020: “Visions”

Kirstyn Leuner

You are invited to submit a proposal for the 28th Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). The NASSR conference, which will bring together 300-400 scholars to discuss literature, philosophy, art, and culture c. 1770-1840, will take place at the University of Toronto, Ontario on August 6-9, 2020.

The deadline for general submissions is 24 January 2020.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://sites.utoronto.ca/wincs/nassr2020

Keynote Speakers:
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University)
Martin Myrone (Tate Britain)

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

  • Re-envisioning Romanticism: looking back and looking forward
  • Visions and the visionary: perception, prognostication, projection, speculation, the speculative
  • Ways of looking: reading, conceptualizing, observing, peeping, gazing, categorizing, examining, recognizing and misrecognizing
  • Visual culture, philosophy, and aesthetics: objects of sight, spectacle, the spectacular, the sublime and the beautiful
  • Reading methods and histories: careful, close, distant, surface; plagiarism, copyright law
  • Print culture in its social, theoretical, and physical aspects (e.g. text, design, structure, layout); manuscripts, letters, journals, scrapbooks, books, journals, newspapers
  • The seen and the unseen: noumena, phenomena, the spirit world, apparitions and appearances
  • Romantic iconoclasm and anti-representationalism; ocularcentrism and “the tyranny of the eye”
  • Visual communication: text, numbers, notation (e.g. musical), images, sign language, placards, banners, flags, gestures, hieroglyphs, emblems, insignia
  • Questions of form and representation
  • Fashionable looking: costume, hair, makeup, manner, style, taste, places to see and be seen
  • Visualizing gender and sexuality: identity, performance, politics
  • Visual and scenic arts: sculpture, painting, illustration, graphic satire, print shops, pornography, broadsheets, dioramas, panoramas, architectural and landscape design
  • Theatre and performing arts: set design, lighting, visual effects, costume, body movement, dance, pantomime, attitudes, tableaux vivants
  • Art collection and assessment: museums and curation, connoisseurship, formal and evaluative concerns (e.g. light, color, pattern, shape, scale, proportion)
  • Visualizing class: social hierarchies and signifiers (e.g. clothing, heraldry, pageantry), occupational and economic segregation
  • Instruments of looking: lenses, spectacles, quizzing glasses, spy glasses, Claude glasses, prisms, mirrors, telescopes, microscopes, orreries, windows
  • Forms of illumination and darkness: lightning, electricity, candlelight, lamps, gas light, spotlights, limelight, torches, fireworks; shade, shadow, twilight, gloom, obscurity
  • Religious vision(s): prophecy, revelation, enthusiasm, sermons and hymns, public and private devotion, natural and revealed religion
  • The science of the eye: vision, optics, visual anatomy, medicine, pathology, disability, blindness
  • Data visualization (e.g. land, economy, population studies): mapping, cartography, geography, geolocation, charts, diagrams, categorization, numerical and pictorial statistics
  • Visualizing race: slavery, racism, racialization, minoritization
  • Vision and ecopoetics: seeing nature (vistas, prospects, the picturesque); noticing and reading features of land, water, and sky; watching weather and recognizing climate; the animal gaze
  • Envisioning space and place: the local and the global, home and abroad, the peripheral and transperipheral
  • Envisioning (the ends of) empire: imperialism, colonialism, sites and sights of war; decolonization, indigenization
  • Political and military forecasting, strategy, optics, campaigns, battlegrounds, political theatre
  • Imagining the future of Romanticism; strategizing its work in the humanities, in the university, and in society

EMAIL CONTACT: nassr2020vision@gmail.com

NASSR2020Poster

Announcements, CFP

Love Among the Poets: The Victorian Poetics of Intimacy (Proposed Volume)

Kirstyn Leuner

Love Among the Poets: The Victorian Poetics of Intimacy

Proposed volume of essays, edited by
Pearl Chaozon Bauer (Notre Dame de Namur University)
Erik Gray (Columbia University)

“Victorian poetry,” as Isobel Armstrong observes, “is unparalleled in its preoccupation with…what it is to love.” For this collection, we are seeking essays that explore the connection between poetry—especially lyric poetry—and the experience of love or intimacy. Some questions that contributors might address (though we welcome all approaches and ideas): How is intimacy represented, or created, by the forms, rhythms, and genres of Victorian poetry? What resources does poetry offer for expressing forms of love that fall outside the traditional marriage plot of the Victorian novel? How did love poetry circulate in the Victorian era? How does it relate to other forms of Victorian art and culture? We are looking for essays that consider a wide variety of intimate relationships: not just sexual or erotic love, but friendship, divine love, marriage, and family love, among others.

Please submit a 500-word abstract no later than August 1, 2020. If you already have a version of your argument drafted—a conference paper, for example, or a dissertation chapter—you are warmly encouraged to submit that together with the abstract. We are in contact with a university press; our aim is to submit a proposal for the collection in the fall of 2020.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the editors:
Pearl Chaozon Bauer (pchaozonbauer@ndnu.edu)
Erik Gray (e.gray@columbia.edu)

Announcements, BWWC, CFP

BWWC 2019: “Movement,” April 25-27

Kirstyn Leuner

Julius_Caesar_Ibbetson_-_George_Biggins'_Ascent_in_Lunardi'_Balloon_-_WGA11831The 2019 British Women Writers Conference will take place on the plains of Auburn Alabama at Auburn University. The conference will take place from April 25 through Saturday, April 27, 2019. The theme for the conference is “movement.”

From transatlantic crossings, transnational diasporas, mobility studies, and the organization of literary history, the idea of movement is rich in significance for the study of British women writers. Our conception of both periods and places is widely defined, and we invite papers that will contribute to a rich discussion of the diversity of women’s writing. Please send a 500-word abstract and a brief bio to bwwc2019@gmail.com by January 5, 2019 [extended deadline].

For more information, see our CFP on the conference website.

 

Image credit: Julius Caesar Ibbetson’s painting “George Biggins’ Ascent in Lunardi’ Balloon” (1785), [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Julius_Caesar_Ibbetson_-_George_Biggins%27_Ascent_in_Lunardi%27_Balloon_-_WGA11831.jpg