Announce

The Society for French Studies Postgraduate Conference 2016

Call for Papers: Protest in French and Francophone Arts and Culture

Date and Place: Saturday 23 April 2016, IMLR (formerly IGRS), Senate House (London)

Deadline for Submission: Monday 1 February 2016

Deadline for Registration: Friday 8 April 2016

Keynote Speaker: ‘(Self-)censorship and the limitations of artistic intervention in Merzak Allouache's Normal! (2011)', Professor Will Higbee (University of Exeter)

Training Session: ‘How to Get Published as a PhD or ECR’, Dr Jamal Bahmad (University of Leeds)

Protest is an intrinsic part of human culture, which enables subjects to express their dissatisfaction with existing social structures and hegemonic hierarchies of power. Protests have occurred across time periods and contexts, and have taken numerous different forms, ranging from personal expressions of discontent to united movements for revolutionary change. Protests can be individual or collective, personal or political, spontaneous or carefully planned, but they are generally orientated towards destabilising the status quo and establishing new modes of existence. Over the ages, political, social and cultural protests have successfully toppled authoritarian regimes, exposed and confronted dominant imbalances of power, and ameliorated conditions for disenfranchised members of society.

Artistic creation, such as literature, music and film, has sometimes supported hegemonic hierarchies and underpinned restrictive regimes. However, art has also played an important role in protesting against unjust power structures and opposing dominant societal mores. In different times and contexts, the Arts have contributed to the institution of social, political and cultural change by facilitating the emergence of subversive viewpoints and previously silenced voices or subjectivities. In both a candid and a concealed manner, the Arts have functioned as vehicles for challenging societal injustice and expressing individual and/or collective feelings of discontent.

The Society for French Studies Postgraduate Conference 2016 invites proposals for twenty-minute papers in English or French that address the broad theme of protest as it relates to the interdisciplinary field of French and Francophone Studies. Contributions from all periods and disciplines are welcome. These might include literary, film, theatre, music, post-colonial, queer, cultural, spatial and translation studies, to name but a few. Individual papers should aim to examine the ways in which French and Francophone art forms have contributed to political, social, cultural, economic, discursive, personal and collective means of protest in France and the wider Francophone world from the past to the present day.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

·         The French Revolution

·         Charlie Hebdoand freedom of speech

·         Anti-racism protests

·         Humour and satire

·         Gender and sexual rights

·         Religious rights

·         Class-based protest

·         Protest and writing

·         Protest and music

·         The “Arab Spring”

·         Grassroots political protest (i.e. street art, graffiti)

·         Censorship

·         Mass demonstrations, rallies and marches

·         Reactionary protests (i.e. ‘La Manif Pour Tous’)

·         Insurrection and riots

·         Civil disobedience

·         Changing modes of protest

·         Social media and political protest

·         Past forms of protest (i.e. Jacquerie, La guerre des farines)

·         Iconoclasm

·         Protest figures past and present

Registration and catering are free of charge, but speakers are asked to seek financial help from their own institutions to cover travel costs.

Please send abstracts (250 – 300 words) for twenty-minute papers (in French or English) along with the name of your institution, the title of your PhD and your year of study to Kaya Davies Hayon (kaya.davieshayon@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk) and Joseph Ford (J.V.Ford@leeds.ac.uk) no later than 1 February 2016. Informal enquiries are also very welcome.

Conference organisers: Kaya Davies Hayon (University of Manchester) and Joseph Ford (University of Leeds).

Please visit our blog for further information: https://sfspgconf2016.wordpress.com/

The Irish Journal of French Studiesinvites abstracts for a special issue on the theme of ‘Systems’. The theme may be approached from the perspective of French or Francophone literature, theory, language, culture or society. Abstracts may be in English, French, or Irish, should be between 300 and 600 words, and must be received before 1 February 2016. Authors will be notified within one month if the editors would like them to proceed to article submission (by 31 December 2016). All articles will be peer-reviewed by external readers. *If accepted*, the articles will be published in the 2017 issue of the journal.

    The Irish Journal of French Studies is an annual international peer-reviewed journal published since 2001 by the Association des Études Françaises et Francophones d’Irlande. The journal is now exclusively available on-line (www.ingentaconnect.com/content/irjofs/ijfs), and has an Open Access policy for all on-line issues published more than two years before the current date. For an overview of all past issues of the journal, see http://www.adeffi.ie/ijfrs-back-issues/.

Le Irish Journal of French Studies sollicite des propositions d’articles pour un numéro spécial autour du thème des ‘Systèmes’. Ce thème peut être abordé dans diverses perspectives, portant sur la littérature, la théorie, la langue, la culture ou la société françaises ou francophones. Les propositions d’articles peuvent être rédigées en anglais, en français, ou en gaélique, devraient être comprises entre 300 et 600 mots, et doivent être reçues par le comité de rédaction avant le 1^er février 2016. La rédaction reprendra contact avec les auteurs avant le 1^er mars 2016 pour inviter ceux-ci à préparer des articles (qui seront à remettre avant le 31 décembre 2016). Tous les articles seront évalués par des lecteurs spécialistes. *Sous réserve d’évaluations positives*, les articles seront publiés dans le numéro 17 (2017) de la revue.

    Le Irish Journal of French Studies est une revue internationale annuelle à comité de lecture, publiée depuis 2001 par l’Association des Études Françaises et Francophones d’Irlande. Tous les numéros parus depuis 2009 sont disponibles en ligne (http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/irjofs/ijfs), et tous sont mis en libre accès après un délai de deux ans. Pour tout renseignement sur les numéros antérieurs de la revue, voir http://www.adeffi.ie/ijfrs-back-issues/.

Dear Colleagues,

Graduate students are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute paper presentations at the 16th annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, to be held February 19-20, 2016 at Duke University.

This year's theme is  “Representations of the Ordinary in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods” and contributions are welcome from a wide variety of humanistic disciplines including, but not limited to History, Musicology, Philosophy, Theology, Literary Studies, Linguistics, Cultural Studies, Political Theory, Sociology, Anthropology, Art History, Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, and Food Studies.

Interested students should email 250-word abstracts to representingtheordinary@gmail.com no later than Thursday, January 14, 2016. Please visit the colloquium's website for more details: http://sites.duke.edu/representationsoftheordinary/

Thank you, NC Colloquium Planning Committee

"stains / les taches" : the Cambridge French Graduate Conference 27th-28th May 2016 Emmanuel College, Cambridge http://stainsconference.wordpress.com Twitter: @stains_taches

The Cambridge French Graduate Conference has been running, with great success, for well over a decade. This respected annual event is a wonderful opportunity for graduate students from all over the UK, as well as from France, elsewhere in Europe and the world, to meet and exchange ideas — in 2015, we hosted speakers from as far away as Québec. The publication of conference proceedings with Peter Lang provides a fantastic opportunity for early publication for many of the conference's speakers.

The 2016 conference, on the topic of "stains / les taches", will take place at Emmanuel College, on Friday 27th and Saturday 28th May. We hope that our theme will enable researchers to engage, if they wish to, with recent theoretical turns towards the material; the full Call for Papers with further suggestions can be found below. We have been lucky enough to secure two fantastic keynote speakers: Laura McMahon, from the French Department and Gonville and Caius, and Pierre Bayard, from Université Paris VIII. Pierre Bayard is a psychoanalyst, and professor of French Literature at Université Paris VIII. His best known work, Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus ? (How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read) was released in 2007 to great critical acclaim, and has been translated into thirty languages. He has also published on Freud, Proust, and detective fiction. Laura McMahon is lecturer in French at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Her research interests lie in connections between cinema and philosophy, with a particular focus on the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis. She is the author of Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis (2012).

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Call for Papers

“Materialism means that the reality I see is never “whole” – not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which signals my inclusion in it.”

– Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View

We invite abstracts for papers of 20 minutes in English or French on the theme of ‘stains’.

guilt, (original) sin, stains on conscience and consciousness. blood-stains, ink stains, rorschach tests, dirt stains, rust, food stains, paint stains. cleansing, cleaning, detergent, stain removal, spotlessness, purity. blemishes, blots, erasure, blind spots, shadows, scars and scarring, marks, spots, discoloration. disgust, abjection, sublimation, stigmata. surface, material, medium. staining as artistic process: woodstaining, stained glass, dyeing and tinting, tattoos, pigments. staining as scientific or diagnostic process: contrast, chemical reaction

Abstracts not exceeding 250 words should be sent to

stainsconference2016@gmail.com by 15th February 2016.