CFP

Next year's Nordic STS Conference will be held at Tampere University, Finland, on 13–14 June 2019, with a pre-conference workshop for junior researchers on 12 June. The call for papers includes a specific call on Literature, Culture and Science with particular reference to Digital Cultures and the Medical Humanities. The deadline for abstracts is 18 January 2019. 

30-31 May 2019: British Institute of Florence

Keynote lectures by Carolyn Burdett and Christa Zorn. The conference will also include a private performance of Lee’s pacifist work, The Ballet of the Nations, staged at her Florentine home, Il Palmerino.

‘Vernon Lee 2019’, an international conference organised by the University of Surrey and the University of Oxford in collaboration with the Associazione Culturale Il Palmerino, marks the centenary of Vernon Lee’s return to her Italian home, Villa Il Palmerino, after enforced exile during WW1. Lee emerged as a significant writer in the heady atmosphere of late nineteenth-century aestheticism and decadence, but she published extensively throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century. As the new century dawned, she became politically active; in the years leading up to WW1, she produced polemical pacifist articles for the periodical press and an important anti-war morality play, Ballet of the Nations (1915). She also took criticism in exciting new directions, focusing on the emerging field of ‘psychological aesthetics’ in Beauty and Ugliness (1912) and The Beautiful (1913), and experimenting with literary analysis in The Handling of Words (1923).

Writing in 2003, Vineta Colby commented that, at that time, only ‘a small company’ read the work of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935). In the fifteen years that have elapsed there has been a major expansion of academic interest in Lee’s oeuvre, which has generated scholarly work, biographies and international conferences. Since then, access to Vernon Lee’s work in published and digitised form has increased dramatically, introducing her to a whole new generation of readers and students, and prompting scholarship not only on her fiction but on the full variety of her interests.

Despite this surge in critical response, however, much of Lee’s large and extremely wide-ranging oeuvre has yet to receive full scholarly attention, especially those writings she produced in the twentieth century. Between 1900 and her death in 1935, she published a wealth of new material including a musical drama, travel writing, novels, philosophical and aesthetic treatises, literary criticism, compilations of supernatural fiction and an important musicological study, Music and Its Lovers (1932).

We welcome proposals for scholarly papers that explore all aspects of Lee’s writings and her literary and artistic connections, with a special focus on her twentieth-century writings. Topics may include but are not limited to the following areas:

• Essays and Fiction
• Travel writing, place and space
• Criticism (aesthetics, musicology, art history, literary criticism)
• Natural and Social Sciences
• Politics, Pacifism, Cosmopolitanism
• Theatre
• Letters
• Circles and Networks

Please send 300-word abstracts, by 15 January 2019, to: VernonLee2019@gmail.com.
Conference organisers: Patricia Pulham, Stefano Evangelista, Elisa Bizzotto, Federica Parretti, Serena Cenni, and Sally Blackburn-Daniels

Please click through for links to the full CFP Beastly Moderisms and Call for Poems Beastly Modernisms

As genetic science develops at breakneck speed, cultural representations register in their form and content changing ideas about the self and personhood, consciousness, behaviour and motivation, heredity, and the boundaries of the human body. And yet, ‘western’ science is only one of a number of frameworks that provide explanations for these phenomena. Knowledge, assumptions and beliefs about what a gene is and what the human genome is, about inheritance, kinship, who owns the body, its parts and ‘data’, are not universal but are culturally produced, culturally interpreted, and culturally situated. For many indigenous communities, for instance, genes may be understood as ‘the ancestors within’ (Grace 1998), a perspective generating different philosophical questions from those raised by ‘western’ scientific frameworks about the make-up of the self and different ethical priorities regarding genetic research.

In this symposium we seek to bring together two recent currents in contemporary biocultural scholarship: a) critical engagement with the representation of ideas from genetic science in media and cultural texts; and b) the development of postcolonial approaches to biomedicine and the life sciences, which interrogate the cultural biases and structural inequalities inherent in these fields. We shall explore the representation of genetic discourse in literature, film, news media, popular culture and philosophy across cultures, and will pay particular attention to representations from the global South.

Topics for consideration may include, but are not limited to, the following:

* How creative works from around the world engage with scientific concepts of the gene, genomics, epigenetics, as well as related ideas including human variation, inheritance and ancestry;

* How genes, the human genome, heredity, and ownership of genetic information are conceptualised across different cultural frameworks;

* How cultural texts are both influenced by, and help to shape understandings of, genetic science;

* How cultural texts negotiate questions of identity (including race, disability, gender, sexuality, and species) in relation to genetics;

* Representations of genetic research, including its methodologies, dissemination, and ethics;

* Postcolonial/decolonial/indigenous approaches to the legal, ethical, regulatory, and market frameworks of the life sciences;

* The relationships between genre, form and genetic representations.

We welcome perspectives from disciplines including literary studies, film studies, history, law, media and cultural studies, critical and cultural theory, philosophy, postcolonial studies, critical medical humanities, disability studies, and bioethics. We are also keen to include participation from creative practitioners (writers, filmmakers, visual artists, performance artists) whose work engages with genetic science, and welcome proposals for creative sessions (film screenings, readings, performances, art exhibits).

Please submit 300-word proposals plus a short bio (100 words) to Clare Barker at c.f.barker@leeds.ac.uk. We also have a limited number of spaces for non-speaking participants; if you would like to attend please submit a short description (200 words max) of how the symposium relates to your field of research, creative or professional practice. The closing date for submissions is Friday 21 December 2018.

This symposium is part of a University of Leeds research project on ‘Genetics and Biocolonialism in Contemporary Literature and Film’ and is funded by a Wellcome Trust Seed Award [grant number 106839/Z/15/Z]. Attendance is free and catering will be provided for all delegates. Accommodation and travel expenses will be covered for all speakers.

‘Locating Health: Regional Historical Perspectives on Human Care 1800-1948’

University of Nottingham, Humanities Building, Friday 11 January 2019, 10.00 – 16.00.

Keynote speaker: Professor Christine Hallett (University of Huddersfield)

For further details see the CfP

Date: Saturday 24^th November 2018 (10:00 – 18:00)

Location: Cardiff University

Organisers: Joan Passey (Exeter, jp374@exeter.ac.uk), Louise Benson-James (Bristol, louise.bensonjames@bristol.ac.uk), Jim Scown (Cardiff, scownj@cardiff.ac.uk)

Keynote: ‘Biggish Data: Friedrich Engels, Material Ecology, and Victorian Data’ by John Parham, University of Worcester

The Environmental Humanities have gained momentum relatively recently, contributing to developing theories of the Anthropocene, responding to rapid changes in climate, and addressing our changing relationship with the world around us. They have also raised questions of how we define, shape, protect, and imagine our environments. This symposium provides a space to consider such questions, while also encompassing a wider sense of environment. How do we discuss the environments of literature – its production, dissemination, and reception? How do we understand the environments of science – its construction, its laboratories, its spaces of discourse? In what environments do we engage with Literature and Science as an interdisciplinary field, and in what environments do we teach, research, and encounter interactions between literature and science? These questions are bound up with, and have the potential to greatly impact, the environmental turn in humanities scholarship.

The research environment is under increasing scrutiny with discussions surrounding funding, the future of research, interdisciplinarity and collaboration, the mental health and wellbeing of researchers, and how the infrastructure and shape of research environments will look in the future. Doctoral and research awards focus on interdisciplinarity and collaboration, and the AHRC's four research themes (Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past, Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities, Science in Culture, and Translating Cultures) all provide scope to consider the history of environments, environments of research, and how we interpret our environments. This symposium provides an opportunity for researchers to reflect on the significance of environments to their research at all stages of their careers, with the aim of providing a supportive collaborative environment in and of itself, while simultaneously offering a forum for considering how literature and science scholarship might address the environmental challenges of the present and future.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Environments of science, including laboratories, field work, universities, hospitals, theatres
• Science and literatures of the environment and environmental sciences
• Global environments; cultural environments; globalisation, national identities, international identities, regionality; postcolonial environmentalism and postcolonial literature and science
• The natural world; animals in the environment; habitats, habitation and cohabitation; agriculture, food and the environment;
• The urban world; the built environment; the subterranean
• Toxic environments; pollution, contagion, poison, criminality, danger, rebellion, resistance; antagonistic environments; monstrous, sublime, and frightening environments; the ecogothic
• What environments best enable the staging, performance, adaptation, re-imagining, or re-working of literature and science?

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers. Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words to bslsenvironments@gmail.com by Monday 15^th October 2018, accompanied by a short biography (60 – 100 words). We welcome proposals for panel presentations, as well as for poster presentations to be held during the lunch break.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Arts University Bournemouth

Frankenstein Unbound: An Interdisciplinary Conference Exploring Mary Shelley and Gothic Legacies

Dates: Wednesday 31 October and Thursday 1 November 2018

Venues: Conference - St Peter’s Church, Bournemouth

Keynote Speakers:

Sir Christopher Frayling, Chancellor, Arts University Bournemouth

Professor Elaine Graham, University of Chester

Professor Sir Peter Cook, CRAB Studios (TBC)

In 1849, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley’s heart were brought to the graveyard of St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth, where they were buried with the remains of Mary Shelley’s parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

In 2018, Arts University Bournemouth and St. Peter’s Church, in association with Bournemouth University, celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s most famous work Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) as part of the Shelley Frankenstein Festival. The academic conference, located at this unique venue, will offer new and re-situated perspectives on Mary Shelley and her writings, her family and circle, and her most famous work. We are pleased to acknowledge colleagues at Bournemouth University for their organisational support.

We invite papers and presentations themed around, but not limited to, the following:

* Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and the Romantics

* Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

* Mary Shelley beyond Frankenstein

* The Shelley family: history and legacy

* Monstrous Romantics

* Frankenstein and the sea

* Theology and Frankenstein

* Frankenstein and philosophy

* Frankenstein at home and abroad

* Adaptations and afterlives

* Frankenstein and medical humanities

* The abject and the sublime

* Frankenstein and emotion

* Guilt and crime in Frankenstein

* Interpretations of Frankenstein in the creative industries (Film, Art, Theatre, Dance, Writing etc)

* Mary Shelley and Gothic legacies

* Gothic architecture

* The Gothic imagination

We welcome proposals for themed panel sessions (maximum three papers), individual twenty-minute presentations, or creative submissions from practitioners and scholars of all fields. We particularly encourage submissions from post-graduate students and Early Career Researchers. Please submit an abstract (300 words) and short biography (100 words) to frankensteinunboundconference@gmail.com by Monday 18th June 2018.

For more information and updates visit our website: https://frankensteinunbound.wordpress.com/