11-12 September 2020

University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

In recent years a body of work – including Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture (2007), Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture (2012), William Blake and the Age of Aquarius (2017), William Blake and the Myth of America (2018), and The Reception of William Blake in Europe (2019) – has emerged around the posthumous reception of the artist and poet, William Blake. From almost complete obscurity following his death in 1827, Blake has become one of the most important figures in British cultural life. What is less understood, outside certain pockets such as the USA and Japan, is the significance of Blake elsewhere in the world.

Today, Blake’s global presence cannot be underestimated. The aim of this project is to showcase the wide variety of global ‘Blakes’ (after Morris Eaves’s “On Blakes We Want and Blakes We Don’t”, 1995, and Mike Goode’s “Blakespotting”, 2006) and to provide an overview of the appropriations and rewritings as well as examples, that fall into three categories: art, literature and music. It will examine how Blake’s global audiences have responded to his poetry and art as well as explore what these specific, non-British responses and cultural and social legacies can bring to the study of Blake. What is fascinating about works in art, literature and music inspired by Blake is the fact in which the verbal and the visual in Blake’s art translates into different cultural contexts in unique ways.

Building on The Reception of Blake in the Orient (2006) and The Reception of William Blake’s Reception in Europe (2019), part of the longstanding and successful series The Reception of British and Irish Authors with Elinor Shaffer as series editor, the organisers welcome proposals for papers (20 minutes) and panels (three 20-minute papers). Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Studies of influence in Literature, such as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, Kenzaburo Oe, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, the Beat Generation and the Black Mountain Poets.
• Blake in translation
• Postcolonial Blake and Blake in world literatures and arts
• Blake and the theatre or performance
• Afterlives in art and exhibition culture, such as Rockwell Kent, Helen Martins, or Subir Hati.
• Blake and graphic novels and comics
• Setting Blake to music
• Reception by Women, People of Colour and LBGT+
• Blake and the digital age
• Routes of transmission: Blake and the web, social media, publishing houses, publishing histories and facsimiles
• Blake and literature written for children
• Blake and film, such as Jim Jarmusch, Derek Jarman, Hal Hartley
• Blake scholarship, including T.S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, S. Foster Damon, Leopold Damrosch, Donald Ault, Robert Gleckner, Hazard Adams, Harold Bloom and David Erdman, Mona Wilson and G.E. Bentley Jr.

Abstracts of up to 300 words along with a short biographical note (50 words in the same Word document) should be sent to Sibylle Erle (sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk) and Jason Whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) by 29 February 2020.

Romanticism and Vision

28th Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR)

University of Toronto, Ontario on August 6-9, 2020.

For more details Click Here

The organizers of NASSR 2020 invite proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables–from scholars emerging and established, and in all areas of literary, philosophical, cultural, and artistic study–on the theme of “Romanticism and Vision.” In the field of Romanticism, the implications of “vision” as a keyword have changed dramatically over the last half-century, and have expanded to include (for example) the embodied senses, technologies of perception, visual and material culture, and the visual and performing arts. We welcome presentations that explore Romanticism’s connection to vision, the visual, and the visionary, understood in the widest possible sense. Approaches that broaden Romanticism’s disciplinary, geographical, and linguistic scope are especially welcome. In our echoing of the “Vision 2020” and “Beyond 2020” motif currently being deployed in academic, business, and public sectors, we aim to make this year’s conference an opportunity to consider the future of Romanticism as a critical field of humanist study, and to strategize about the role of Romanticism in shaping the future of the university.

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 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

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

Special Seminar Leaders:
Luisa Calè (Birkbeck, University of London)

Timothy Campbell (University of Chicago)

William H. Galperin (Rutgers University)

Ian Haywood (University of Roehampton)

Grégory Pierrot (University of Connecticut at Stamford)

Padma Rangarajan (University of California, Riverside)

Gillian Russell (University of York)

Sophie Thomas (Ryerson University)

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

EMAIL CONTACT: nassr2020vision@gmail.com

20th November, 6.30-8.00pm

University of Derby

Professor Tim Fulford and Dr Andrew Lacey

We are delighted to announce that the Midlands Romantic Seminar is being re-launched on 20th November at the University of Derby.  Our first event will welcome Professor Tim Fulford and Dr Andrew Lacey, two members of the research team involved with the Davy Letters Project, who will each be speaking about their recent research on the chemist and poet Humphry Davy.

Event Details:

6.30-8.00pm

Room OL1, Kedleston Road Campus

Professor Tim Fulford (De MOntfort University), ‘From Derbyshire to Vesuvius:Humphry Davy and the Midlands Enlightenment’

Dr Andrew Lacy (Lancaster University), ‘Brothers in Science: John and Humphry Davy’

There will be a Wine Reception afterwards. All are very welcome! Please do pass this information on to anyone who you think would be interested in attending.

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There will be two further Midlands Romantic Seminars during the year 2019/20: watch this space for more details and follow us on Twitter @RomanticMidland. If you have any proposals for future seminars or events, please contact Dr Paul Whickman and Dr Erin Lafford at either p.whickman@derby.ac.uk or e.lafford@derby.ac.uk.

The fifteenth annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science

University of Sheffield

Wednesday 15 April until Friday 17 April 2020.

Keynote speakers will be Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Oxford), Professor Martin Willis (Cardiff), and Professor Angela Wright (Sheffield).

The BSLS invites proposals for 20-minute papers, panels of three papers, or special roundtables on any subjects within the field of science (including medicine and technology), and literatures in the broadest sense, including theatre, film, and television.

The conference will include a visit to the Alfred Denny Zoological Museum(pictured), and the Turner Museum of Glass will host a keynote lecture and the wine reception.

Please send an abstract (200 words) and short biographical note (50 words) to Katherine Ebury and Helena Ifill at shefbsls2020@gmail.com by no later than 18.00 GMT on Thursday 12^th of December. Please include the abstract and biographical note in the body of the email.

The conference fee will be waived for two graduate students in exchange for written reports on the conference, to be published in the BSLS Newsletter. If you are interested in being selected for one of these awards, please mention this when sending in your proposal. To qualify you will need to be registered for a postgraduate degree at the time of the conference.

Information concerning registration fees and local hotels will be forthcoming.

Membership:

Conference delegates will need to register/renew as members of the BSLS. Annual membership: £25 waged/ £10 unwaged.

Randomness CfP

Queen’s University Belfast

15-17 September 2020

Keywords: Accidental, arbitrary, incidental, slapdash, hit-or-miss, unplanned, unintended (e.g. consequences), unexpected, unanticipated, unpredictable, contingent, volatility, excitement, wonder, fantasy, imagination, creativity, serendipity.

Chance encounters, unforeseen opportunities, and impulsive decisions play a bigger role in our life and work than we wish to acknowledge. Is reading not always random to some extent? It is only retrospectively, in shifting scale from the individual to social or perspective from reading to interpreting, that randomness becomes regularity and can get explained away as purpose and design.

Randomness and chance play a leading role in historical accounts, in narratives of war and battles, victory and defeat, in biographies and travelogues, in narratives of arrivals, encounters and departures. They resurface in stories, setting characters onto a course or hurtling them into the great unknown, towards their fate. People’s bookshelves, readers’ memories, and second-hand bookshops can produce a similar, puzzling – even dizzying – sense of randomness.

Fortunes of literary works and theory are not immune to the dictates of chance. What are the forces that get literary works published, translated, circulated locally or internationally, and nominated for and winning literary prizes? When do managed search algorithms fail and serendipitous connections appear? How do chance encounters with a literary work, a theory, or lead to translations or adaptations, new creative adventures, or additional and alternative theories?

Artists and writers can be more comfortable with randomness than scholars; they break away from the space of the familiar and the already-known and place trust in the process of the work itself. Critics are driven by institutional pressures to present their work as an execution of purpose, design and method. But randomness persists even in grand geo-political schemes. Randomness overcomes censorship and solutions are always found to circulate books without the support of publishers or the state. Randomness happens despite control, and may be the more attractive for it. It is often random finds that are the most treasured with a sense of delight. Random encounters excite imagination and creativity.

Randomness is also openness; it stands more often at beginnings and turns of the road of many literary and critical careers. How do we cultivate a sense of wonder and open up our critical discourses and theories of comparative literature and world literature to more inclusive and elastic modes of thinking and writing? Can we use randomness in and outside texts and oeuvres productively, to our advantage?

We seek panels that will work with the idea of randomness, particularly in relation to:

• Encounters with literary works, theories and cultural others
• Adaptations, new writings, performances, visualizations within the same literary/cultural field, or outside.
• Representing randomness through visualisations and digital interfaces.
• Multilingualism, heterolingualism, plurilingualism, translanguaging
• Performance, performativity
• Politics of the literary/cultural market, including publication, translation, circulation, literary prizes and literary festivals (and book fairs)
• Critiquing randomness in the age of search algorithms
• Unpredictable futures
• Ecocritical approaches to randomness and unpredictability
• Translation and translation studies, choice of work and language, choice of method and style
• Theories and Methods of Comparative Literature and World Literature

Deadlines: 15 November 2019 for Panel proposals and 15 December 2019 for Paper proposals.

Submit your proposal to: randomness2020bcla@gmail.com or through the conference website https://randomness2020.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/.