Announce

Women contributed extensively to the production of knowledge in the eighteenth century, without however always receiving credit for their intellectual and scientific practices. Largely excluded from the ranks of universities and academies, women fashioned alternative practices and found other venues in the margins of the institutions of knowledge. Their participation in intellectual life took multiple forms: by participating in correspondence networks, by influencing and facilitating the election of new academy members, by participating in competitions anonymously, or simply by publishing their work. Others were patrons, hosted salons, wrote memoirs, attended public lessons and sessions, etc. This panel seeks to re-evaluate women's relationships to multiple forms of knowledge production in eighteenth- century Europe.

Please send a 200-word abstract to Julie Candler Hayes (jhayes@hfa.umass.edu) and Sarah Benharrech (sbenharr@umd.edu) by September 15th 2019.

https://www.asecs.org/asecs-2020

17th Borders and Crossings Travel Writing conference

University of Sydney, Australia 20-23 July 2020

Conference theme: ‘Travelling differently’

Conference background

The first of the ‘Borders and Crossings’ conferences, a series devoted to the international, interdisciplinary study of travel writing, was organised by Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, and held at Magee College, Derry in 1998. Travel literature was at that time far from mainstream as an area of academic research, but the intervening two decades have witnessed a major shift in attitudes towards the genre, with the emergence of dedicated journals, scholarly associations and other academic apparatus associated with the building of a new field. ‘Borders and Crossings’ has played a catalytic role in these processes as it has provided a forum for scholars across a range of disciplines and from a wide variety of national contexts to meet regularly, to explore an increasingly rich corpus of travel writing, and to debate its centrality to the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

In 2020, the Borders and Crossings conference will come to Australia for the second time (the first was at the University of Melbourne in 2008), and will have as its core theme the idea of differences and diversity in means and experiences of travel.

Call for papers: ‘Travelling differently’

The 2020 conference will take part in a unique context: that of a postcolonial yet white-western dominated member of the ‘Anglosphere’, situated in a South-East Asian and Pacific Island geographical, economic and political context. Contemporary Australia, and its founding settlement of Sydney, epitomise borders and crossings. It is founded on different types of travel: forced and chosen, tourism and exile, appropriation and return, movement of ideas and cultures, movement of species and their shifting environments. We thus invite conference participants to reflect on the theme of ‘travelling differently’. Subthemes can include but are not limited to 

-          Redefining regions: How have borders changed or are they changing? What makes them more or less porous? What factors impact on who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’?

-          North-north and south-south interactions: Much of our world has been shaped by north-south interactions, but north-north interactions continue to dominate the global cultural conversation at the same time as south-south interactions are emerging as new vehicles for political and cultural exchange.

-          Ideas travelling: how do contemporary shifts in political, economic and cultural power impact on the ways in which ideas travel?

-          Travelling minorities: in countries like Australia, Indigenous people have travelled lands and continents for millennia, but modern societies create new challenges: those of displacement and ‘exile within’. Other racialised minorities, and indeed women and LGBTI populations, also face different challenges in travelling, whether material (personal safety, less access to the means to travel), psychological, cultural or symbolic. 

-          Animals travelling: a country like Australia is well-placed to know how the transport of animals around the globe has impacted on ecosystems, cultures and economies in our Anthropocene age. How do animals feature in travel writing? What symbolic roles do they play?

-          Forced travelling: asylum seekers, Indigenous peoples, and all others displaced due to a range of natural and human-made catastrophes experience travel differently from those who have a choice in the matter. How is their experience documented and imagined?

-          Travelling objects: Humans are collectors—whether purchasers or plunderers—and transporters of things. What do ‘travelling objects’ come to symbolise in the ways we talk and write about travel? 

-          Repatriation: Travellers—whether human or inanimate, whether exiled or ‘born displaced’, whether in times of war or times of peace—also experience return, in life and after death. What is the place of repatriation in our cultural narratives?

-          Travelling words: Languages also travel the globe, often becoming means of literary expression as second or third languages of the writers. Words also travel through translation, or travel from orality to page as written forms are developed for traditional languages. How does the language of expression impact on the ways in which we write and read about travel?

-          Travelling images: Our artistic traditions, from visual arts through to performance and cinema, have developed rich hybridities through the travel of styles and models from one culture to another. 

-          Virtual travel & proxy travel: in our internet-facilitated age, virtual travel is a reality for many, not only vicarious tourism but also the virtual transnational workplace.

-          Imagined universes: stories of travel lie at the core of science-fiction and fantasy writing. Indeed, one cannot imagine other universes without travelling to them.

-          Philanthropic travelling: our age has seen an explosion of philanthropic travel, and documentation thereof, whether through a growing body of testimony by volunteers working for NGOs or through the ubiquitous imagery of philanthrocapitalists travelling the Third World.  When one is ‘travelling for others’, how does the narrative of travel change?

Diseases travelling:  From the plague to cholera to AIDS to H1N1 (the virus that caused the pandemics of Spanish flu in 2018-2019 and swine flu in 2009) to Ebola, the world has experienced its share of pandemics. Travelling diseases become imbricated with the history of peoples, cultures, nations, and have often played central roles in travel writing, whether testimonial or fictional. 

Teaching travel writing: why, and how, does one ‘teach’ travel writing? What roles does travel writing play in our curricula, whether in literature, foreign languages, area studies, international studies or history?

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 March 2020.

For all enquiries contact Conference Convenor Bronwyn Winter: bronwyn.winter@sydney.edu.au

AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES (ASECS) 2020 panel.

Abstracts to Jessica L. Fripp, Assistant Professor of Art History, TCU (j.fripp@tcu.edu) before sept 16.

“Too political, too big, no good”: picturing politics in the long eighteenth century

“Too political, too big, no good” were the words Kim Sajet, director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, reportedly used to turn down Julian Raven’s gift of his propagandistic/fan-art portrait of Donald Trump, Unafraid and Unashamed. Inspired by this amusing, if somewhat absurd, event, this panel seeks papers that address political art in the long eighteenth century (1660-1830) that was celebrated at the time but is now maligned, or vice versa. Topics might include: official commissions celebrating events that have fallen out of favor due to changing understandings of histories of power (for example, colonial or imperialistic endeavors); works that have been positively or negatively affected by the vagaries of taste for a style or an artist; works taken up independently by artists that were well-received or rejected; or works that demonstrate the conflict between the needs of a political regime and the public. What did it mean for a work of art to be “too political,” “too big,” or “no good” in the eighteenth century? What impact do these value judgments have on our understanding of political art, then and now?  

May 19-20, 2020, University of Manchester 

Proposals: December 1, 2019

Keynote Speakers: Najwa al-Qattan (Loyola Marymount University), Seth Anziska (University College London), Yulia Egorova (Durham University), and Brian Klug (Oxford University)

Call for Papers

Beyond ‘Jewish-Muslim Relations’ invites scholars of Jewish and Muslim histories, cultures, politics, theologies and peoples to share comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of these topics as they relate to and come into contact with one another. Despite many theological and cultural similarities and frequent social proximity between Jews and Muslims, Jewish-Muslim relations in both contemporary societies and in diverse historical and geographic settings are often depicted in polarized binary terms. This conference aims to understand interactions and relations between Jews and Muslims in a wide variety of contexts beyond this binary. We encourage papers which offer innovative theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to the study of these topics, and in particular seek papers which adopt a critical approach to the terminology of ‘Jewish-Muslim relations,’ which might itself inadvertently invoke binary, possibly predetermined relations between Jews and Muslims qua Jews and Muslims, often within historical and socio-political frameworks that have reified categories of Jews, Muslims, and inter-ethnic/-religious relations.

We welcome papers on topics including, but not limited to:

·         Historical cases of interaction between Jews and Muslims

·         Representations and self-representations of Jews and Muslims

·         Jewish and Muslim interfaith activism/dialogue

·         Religion, tradition, secularism and innovation

·         Antisemitism and Islamophobia

·         Islamic and Jewish polemic and intellectual cross-fertilisation

·         Critical theory and Jewish-Muslim relations

·         Gender and sexuality

·         Jews and Muslims in the arts, literature and media

·         Multilingualism, translation and transnationalism

Paper proposals should include abstracts of 250 words and a speaker biography of no more than 100 words. Speakers are allocated 20 minutes to present and 10 minutes for questions and discussion. Please address all proposals and queries to the organizers (Adi Bharat and Katharine Halls) at jewish.muslim@manchester.ac.uk

Deadline for submissions: December 1, 2019

Writing Health from the Eighteenth Century to the Twenty-First 

3-5 June 2020 Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Northumbria University, in connection with a three-year Leverhulme Trust-funded major project, is organising a two-day conference focusing on writing by and about doctors and other health practitioners, encompassing everything from physicians and apothecaries to midwives and cunning women. The aim of the conference is to give scholars the opportunity to explore the phenomenon of writing doctors and its wide social effects, whether it be representations of medical practitioners in literature and art, or creative works written by medical people. The interdisciplinary nature of the subject invites work on cultural, economic and gender history, as well as literary, visual and performing arts.​

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​Plenary Speakers:

Michelle Faubert, Associate Professor of English, University of Manitoba and Visiting Fellow, Northumbria University;  

Pratik Chakrabarti, Professor in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester; 

Tita  Chico, Professor of English, University of Maryland.​

The movement of medical writing from Latin to English in the Early Modern era opened up knowledge previously monopolised by an elite readership. Medical practitioners of both genders recognised the potential to build up their brand by catering to a burgeoning market of eager new readers. Publishers and booksellers capitalised on increased literary rates and greater purchasing powers amongst the public to produce ever-growing quantities of scientific texts – further fuelling public fascination with health and wellbeing, especially that of women. Practitioners, in entering this marketplace, were laid increasingly open to public ownership, as a personality behind the prose, either for better or worse. The full social, economic and political implications of this radical shift in the dissemination of information in the medical field have only just begun to be uncovered by scholars. This conference aims to open up discussion regarding all elements of this topic ca. 1660 to the present day. Topics might include, but are not limited to: 

Representation of, and writing by, medical practitioners in literary, visual and performing arts 

Medical self-fashioning 

The role of gender in medicine (e.g. female apothecaries, midwives, cunning women, etc.) 

Definitions of medical writing and the role of genre 

European, Trans-Atlantic, Asian, and colonial medicine 

Satire – in all its forms – directed at medical practice, both lay and professional, including by medical people themselves 

Discourse and correspondence between practitioners, and practitioners and their patients 

The nature of medical publishing

We welcome proposals from researchers across a range of disciplines and stages of career, including early career and student scholars.  Please send proposals of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a short biography, to writingdocs18@gmail.com  by Friday 15th November 2019. Papers will be invited on a wide variety of relevant topics from within the period. A selection of revised papers is expected to be published as part of the project outputs.​

For more information, contact: 

Clark Lawlor 

Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature, 

Department of Humanities, University of Northumbria

Clark.Lawlor@northumbria.ac.uk  

PI Writing Doctors: Representation and Medical Personality ca. 1660-1832

http://writingdoctors.info/  A Leverhulme Trust Major Project