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We are happy to broadcast details of conferences of especial interest to postgraduate students. For other forthcoming literary conferences in the UK, see the British Council Conferences Database.

Beyond Adaptation: Appropriations, Allusions and Intertextuality (One-Day Postgraduate Symposium)

Thursday 27th January 2011, De Montfort University

As the field of adaptation studies progresses away from questions of ‘infidelity’ and the ‘betrayal’ of source material, a new set of disciplines and theories have emerged to help us understand the relationship between texts. It is now understood that artistic works are not single entities created independently of culture, but can be understood as an amalgamation of influences, allusions, and borrowings from previous texts. This intertextual model for the mapping of texts and their influences provokes questions about the very nature of adaptation. What is adaptation, and how does it differ from intertextuality? Do boundaries between texts exist? How have multiplicity and intertextuality altered perceptions of storytelling across mediums? This one day conference aims to investigate these questions regarding the complex dialogues between texts within culture, with the hope of better understanding the relationship of adaptation and intertextuality.

We invite contributions from research students from across disciplines in the Arts and Humanities. Suggestions may include (but are not limited to):

• Adaptation Theory
• Parody, Homage, Pastiche, Mockumentary, Ironic Allusion, Non-Fiction and Biopics
• Intertextuality
• Genre, Narratology and Narration across Media
• Reader-response/Audience Expectation
• Unconscious Adaptation
• Screenwriting, Screenplays and the Adaptation Process
• Marginalised Adaptations: novelisations/music/computer games/graphic novels/youtube
• Film Remakes, Spin-Offs and Franchises
• Representations of Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality

Interested researchers should submit a 300 word abstract for 20 minute papers to beyondadaptation@dmu.ac.uk
by 31st October 2010.

Why Allegory Now?

1 April 2011, University of Manchester

Confirmed plenary speaker: Professor Jeremy Tambling, English and American Studies, University of Manchester

The University of Manchester invites scholars and early researchers to submit papers for the conference 'Why Allegory Now?', an interdisciplinary event which will allow a forum of discussion on the disparate ways in which allegory has been used throughout history, and consider how such an elusive yet prominent form can be interpreted today.

The conference asks: What is allegory and why is it relevant today? Can allegory be best understood as a genre, a technique, a mode, a rhetorical device or a trope? Is allegory the practice of writing, interpreting or representing? Can allegory only be understood in relation to its history? Is all allegory ideological? Is all language allegorical?

From early Greek examples, such as Plato's Allegory of the Cave, through to Renaissance poetry, Orwell's Animal Farm and The Matrix trilogy, allegories have been used by philosophers, theologians, artists and authors to express complex ideas in simplified and universal terms. Despite Maureen Quilligan's suggestion that 'the status of allegory has been low since the early nineteenth century' (Quilligan, 1992), it underpins many aspects of modern life, as Brenda Machosky points out: 'embedded in museum displays, providing structure for scientific thought, underlying the legal system, evading the hegemony of the idea, allegory is thriving in the twenty-first century' (Machosky, ed., 2010). Machosky's argument is potent given the number of recent studies on the topic (Machosky, ed., 2010; Tambling, 2004 and 2010; Struck and Copeland, eds., 2010), which have served to renew interest in the various forms and uses of allegory across the arts, humanities and languages. As such, this event will consider allegory in fictional and non-fictional literature, film, art, history, religion and cultural theory.

We warmly invite proposals for twenty minute papers from postgraduates and early career researchers from any branch of arts and humanities. Key topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Myths and fables from Ancient Greece to modern film
• National allegories in colonial and postcolonial contexts
• Medieval and Renaissance secular or religious allegories
• Allegorical concepts of history
• Theories of allegory and allegoresis

• Sign, symbol, emblem and allegory

Please send your abstract of 250-300 words to <whyallegorynow@gmail.com> along with your name, affiliation and title of paper.

The deadline for submissions is Monday January 3rd 2011. Acknowledgement of receipt of proposal will be sent. Selection of papers will be done by Monday January 24th 2011.

We are also delighted to offer two bursaries of £100 which will be awarded to postgraduate speakers on any Renaissance-related topics courtesy of the Society for Renaissance Studies (http://www.rensoc.org.uk). If you have any questions regarding the conference and/or proposal, please direct all enquiries to Jade Munslow Ong and Matthew Whittle at <whyallegorynow@gmail.com>. Registration will open from January 31st 2011.

Landscapes of Secrecy: The CIA in History, Fiction and Memory

April 29-30 2011, University of Nottingham

April 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs episode, when the CIA’s failed attempt to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba placed the Agency under the public spotlight and triggered debates over its role in US foreign policy that have never really subsided. This conference brings together many of the world’s leading scholars in the field to debate the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and its place within the wider realms of post-war American politics and culture.

Focusing on the place of the CIA in post-war of American diplomacy and foreign policy, and also the more general public reception of the subject, the conference seeks to integrate international and cultural perspectives to provide a comprehensive approach to CIA history.

How, for example, have official strategies and forward history programmes sought to manage the representation of intelligence within the documentary record of American foreign policy? How have academics and journalists contested official efforts to shape the CIA narrative and sought access to primary source documentation? What has been the role of retirees and their memoirs, either in their authorised form, or as 'renegade' accounts? To what extent have fiction, 'faction' and film accounts of the CIA been subject to ‘politicisation’ and official control? To what extent is this 'factional' material often considered 'reliable' or 'real', and accordingly, what has been the role of this material in shaping the public understanding of the CIA within American foreign policy?

The intention of this conference is to consider these questions, examine the manner in which the history of the Central Intelligence Agency has evolved between 1947 and 2001, and moreover, to interrogate the way in which academics, journalists and other non-state actors have reacted to and negotiated their relationship with the CIA. We therefore welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of this topic - whether they are thematic or more focused on specific case studies.

Further details are available at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/American/Landscapes/intro.aspx

Please forward 250 word paper proposals and a 1-page C.V. including author’s name, address, email and institutional affiliation to: Landscapes-of-secrecy@nottingham.ac.uk

Women & Science in the Nineteenth-Century: Science Fiction and Science Education - The Life and Work of Jane Webb Loudon

Monday 27th and Tuesday 28th June 2011, Leeds Trinity University College

Keynote speakers: Matthew Beaumont, Alan Rauch, Andy Sawyer, Ann B. Shteir

Jane Webb Loudon (1807-1858) is a neglected figure of interest to a range of research areas including women’s professional writing, the promotion of science and women’s education and speculative fiction. She is best known for The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) and Gardening for Ladies (1840). The conference intends to explore the life, work and example of Jane Webb Loudon in the context of women and science in the nineteenth century. It therefore seeks papers from various disciplinary perspectives on fictional and non-fictional contributions by women to the formation of popular scientific awareness during the nineteenth century. For further details see www.arpf.org.uk.

First call for papers: Please send 500 word abstracts to arpfmail@yahoo.co.uk with the subject line ‘Women and Science in the Nineteenth Century’

Poetry and Melancholia

8-10 July 2011, University of Stirling

Keynote speakers: Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, University of London), Don Paterson (Poet), and Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton University). Other speakers include John Drakakis (Stirling University), Lorna Hutson (University of St Andrews), Ron Levao (Rutgers University), Cornelia D. J. Pearsall (Smith College) and David G. Riede (Ohio State University).

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the nature and representation of melancholia within poetry and its relationship to poetics and poetic creation from the Renaissance to the present. Drawing together contributors from Art History, Literature, Medical Humanities, Philosophy, and Print Media, Poetry and Melancholia will try to examine the variety of forms that melancholia has historically taken and extend its meaning beyond the social, medical and epistemological norms that had framed it as a sign of mental illness or a way of behaving to that of a cultural idea. We aim to define not only the different configurations and significance of melancholia as mood, feeling, state of mind, and a cultural outlook but also the role that modernity has played in its development from a medical discourse to a dispositional perspective. The Stirling International Poetry Conference has always been an event that both welcomes and supports practising poets, and this year working poets are especially welcome to participate by giving readings of their work and engaging in the subject debates around melancholia and poetry.

Themes:

Aesthetics: the sublime, art and longing, decadence, narcissism and loss, revelations of destruction, degeneration, eroticism, melancholy genius, nostalgia, spleen, the states of boredom

Affect: sensibility, solitude and alienation, despair, grief, suffering and sadness, distorted senses, mood as language, psychology, transference, the workings of sympathy, haunting and return

Biomedical sciences: clinical depression, malady, delirium, humors, mental derangement, physiology and pathologies of the mind, psychoanalytic workings of mourning, somatic conditions

Nature, Space, and Landscape: landscape and distance, the resistance of physical objects, conflicts with nature, interior distance and phenomenology

Poetics: creativity, idleness and labour, imagination, inspiration and delirium, the politics of form and genre (allegory, elegy, lyric, and pastoral, etc.), poetry’s relation to the visual and plastic arts

Tradition and History: appropriations of classical theories of melancholia, the idea of tainted inheritance, the traditions of witchcraft and the demonic, the past as loss, writing and memory

Sociology: alienation, anomalies of self-consciousness and the will, fragmentation and conflicts of modernity, otherness, gender, class, race, sexuality, social role of the poet, suicide

Please submit 300 word abstracts for 20 minute papers or proposals for panels together with a short biographical note or CV to Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and David Miller at poetryandmelancholia@stir.ac.uk by no later than 15 January 2011.

OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS

Mailing List for Part-Time Tutors (Subject Centre)

Focus Group on Part-Time Teaching (Subject Centre)

Raymond Williams Society: Postgraduate Essay Competition 2010

The Raymond Williams Society has launched a postgraduate student essay competition for work grounded in the tradition of cultural materialism. The aim is to encourage a new generation of scholars in this area, especially those who are engaged in discourses and approaches arising from the work of Raymond Williams.
The competition is open to anyone studying for a higher degree (masters or doctoral) in the UK or abroad, either on course, or who graduated no later than 31 July 2008. The prize for the winning entry is £100, and a year's subscription to the Society. The winning essay will also be considered for publication in a future issue of our peer-reviewed journal Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism.

Submission Requirements:

Entries should be between 5-7000 words long, including endnotes (which should normally be kept to a minimum). Entries must follow the Style Notes for contributors which are published on the Raymond Williams website: http://www.raymondwilliams.co.uk/ <http://www.raymondwilliams.co.uk/>. Entries must be submitted electronically. Please send your submission to the Contributions Editor of Key Words, Catherine Clay (catherine.clay@ntu.ac.uk), accompanied by a brief coversheet with the following details, and ask your supervisor to send us an email confirming your status:

Name
Postal Address
Email address
Institutional affiliation
Current or most recent programme of study
Date of graduation (if applicable)
Title of essay
Word count

The deadline for entries is 31 December 2010.

New Journal on Oscar Wilde

I have established a free monthly electronic journal for the exchange
of information on current research, publications and productions
concerning Oscar Wilde and his circle. Since May it has attracted
237 subscribers, the vast majority teaching members of English
Departments in some 130 universities worldwide.

I am particularly anxious to reach Ph.D. students working on Wilde
who can use our Work in Progress and Notes & Queries sections. To
subscribe one has only to send an e-mail to oscholarship@ireland.com,
including e-mail address, actual name if the e-mail name is a nom de
courrier electronique, and university affiliation.

D.C. Rose

'Manuscript' Journal - Manchester University

ManuScript is the journal run by postgraduate students of the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. Contributions are welcomed not only by students from the department, but by postgraduates from other universities. It is a refereed academic journal.

They are currently revamping the structure of both the journal and the website to be more reflective of the university experience. They are aiming to expand the journal to be more broadly reflective of the available range of MA courses available, placing a greater emphasis on creative writing. There will also be an expanded reviews section, looking not only at academic works, but also fiction, and the Arts in Manchester.

Please contact them via e-mail if you have any questions about the journal or wish to become involved. See the Contact Us page to direct your enquiry to a more specific member of the editorial team.

This website is fully operational, though some areas are still under construction.

(Full access via subscription)

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