HT 2017 Week 0 Updates
From zombies to online literary production, OCCT has a more than stellar term coming up! We’re hosting all sorts of translation events. At our Forgotten Europe event we bring together 4 major translators to discuss what it means to translate and publish minor European languages. Adriana X. Jacobs and Marcela Sulak talk about translation as ‘afterlife’, while Sarah Ekdawi and Yousif Qasmiyeh reflect on the fragmentary elements of translating poetry. For the more practically minded, we have an excellent translation masterclass with the Nicky Harman (no knowledge of Chinese necessary), and a talk on how to write academic reviews with Marilyn Booth. The Cultural Forms in Comparison and the Fiction and Other Minds research strands are both in rude health, offering us seminars on Online and Offline Cultural Production and Modalities of Reading respectively. The Discussion Group is alive and kicking and will examine questions of aesthetic judgement. We also have a sterling new initiative: an East Asian Working Group that discusses key theories in East Asian comparative criticism.
The Creativity and Languages Conference is the opening conference for the Creative Multilingualism programme, to which OCCT’s Prismatic Translation is contributing a research strand. Learn more here.
Looking forward to seeing you all soon!
CFPs and Events
1. LinguaMania: free LiveFriday event at Ashmolean Museum hosted by Creative Multilingualism
27th January 2017: 7pm - 10.30pm
Join us in the Ashmolean Museum after hours to celebrate linguistic diversity with multilingual music, theatre, interactive art, and language taster sessions.
Book your free tickets at:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/linguamania-livefriday-tickets-29305737249
Tickets are limited and booking is essential.
2. Please consider the following session for the 5th Annual Intersections/Intersezioni Conference, which will take place in Florence, May 31-June 1, 2017.
RETHINKING POWER AND EVIL: ITALIAN CULTURE IN THE FACE OF HORROR
As Simona Forti writes in New Demons (2012), “the problem of evil is not only still relevant but also, first and foremost, the a priori in the human animal’s search for meaning.” Indeed, the question of power and evil has always been a central concern for modern and contemporary Italian culture. Shocked by major historical events such as the advent of fascism, the world wars, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, political and religious terrorism, Italian writers, artists, and philosophers sought new expressive modes to answer the pressing questions of their time. They challenged the canon and sought new concepts to explore the structures of power and psychological motivations that lead to violence and suffering. They interrogated the complex relationship between perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. They looked for the most effective ways to bear witness to personal and collective experiences. In brief, they used art to understand history and history to change art. But what pre-comprehension of power and evil underlies their analyses and creations? What kind of ideas and cultural paradigms shaped their interpretations of terrible historical events? How are we to conceive the conditions of possibility for evil, or resistance to evil? This section aims to explore how we use art, cinema, literature, and philosophy to grapple with the questions of power and evil, and how evil and history compel us to think and create in novel ways. Contributions that analyse the concepts through which writers, artists, and philosophers have interpreted and “explained” evil historical events are particularly welcome.
Please contact Stefano Bellin
University College London – s.bellin@ucl.ac.uk
Here is the link to the proposed sessions:
https://sites.google.com/site/intersezioni2017/home/intersections---call...
3. CALL FOR PAPERS
Metropolis 2017
Monday, 26 - Thursday, 29 June 2017
Venue: IMLR, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, WC1E 7HU
The DAAD Postgraduate Summer School is an opportunity for postgraduate students of German, both from the UK and abroad, to gather together for several days of papers, discussions, and social events. In 2017, this 4-day conference will take place between 26 and 29 June at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR) in London, and will be (appropriately) themed around the concept of ‘metropolis’.
Keynote speakers: Erica Carter (King’s College London); Ruth Dawson (Hawaii/IMLR); Matthew Gandy (Cambridge); Esther Leslie (Birkbeck College, London); Martin Swales (University College London). In addition to the conference panels, the summer school will include a number of other stimulating events, such as a screening of Fritz Lang's 1927 expressionist epic Metropolis, walking tours exploring the ‘hidden’ sides of London's history and infrastructure, and an opportunity to respond creatively to the ‘metropolis’ theme.
Postgraduates working on any aspect of German Studies (literature, cinema, cultural studies, history, politics, philosophy, visual arts, architecture and planning) are invited to submit abstracts (maximum 200 words) on the theme of ‘metropolis’ for 20-minute papers (in English or German) via the submission form to metropolis2017@sas.ac.uk by Monday, 16 January 2017.
4. Submissions to UTQ
University of Toronto Quarterly welcomes contributions in all areas of the humanities – literature, philosophy, fine arts, music, the history of ideas, cultural studies, and so on. It favours articles that appeal to a scholarly readership beyond the specialists in the field of the given submission. For full details, please visithttp://bit.ly/utqsubmit
5. *Extended deadline*
A Call for Papers from PhD candidates, early career researchers and postdoctoral scholars to submit to the following panel of the English: Shared Futures Conference
English: Shared Futures, A Major Conference Across the Discipline
Newcastle Civic Centre, Wednesday 5th – Friday 7th July, 2017
English Studies in Ruins?: The Future Shape of English Studies in a Changing Academic Climate
What does the future hold for the survival of English Studies, within and beyond the academy? And what potential does the discipline have to continue to flourish within an increasingly fast-paced academic market? Addressing the trials facing the discipline in today’s academic climate, this panel aims to open up a space for productive interdisciplinary and cross-period debate regarding the future of English Studies. Potential papers may address such issues as the drawing of disciplinary boundaries – considering what ‘English Studies’ has and will include and exclude, the problematic history of self-definition within the discipline, the effects of ‘measurable values and outputs’ on English as an academic subject, and even whether there is a place for cross-period scholarship in English Studies amidst the rise of historicism as a ‘turn away’ from theory. Other proposed themes may include but are by no means limited to:
• The future of English Studies in an age of globalization
• What challenges have faced the subject in the past, and how might these help us address those it faces now?
• The changing place/status of English Studies within the Humanities
• The ‘co-option’ of English into other disciplines as either adaptation or demise
• Possibilities/strategies for challenging the focus on period-based study/research
• How English Studies has, and can, address wider audiences
• The relationship between English Studies and consumer culture/commodification
• English Studies beyond the academy
• English Studies and public responsibility – diversity, inclusion and accessibility
• What forms of knowledge English Studies produces? How are these measurable/’useful’?
• Whether the discipline should/can/must resist instrumentalist forms of knowledge
• The role of open access publishing and other media platforms in shaping its future
• Digital Humanities and English Studies
This list is by no means exhaustive and we welcome papers to interpret the panel theme from a variety of different and unique perspectives and standpoints, across different disciplines, periods and career trajectories. Ultimately this is an invaluable opportunity for early career academics and postgraduates to come together and discuss the outlook for English Studies in a meaningful way that may well help shape its future possibilities and prospects.
Proposals should be no longer than 500 words, and submitted by the 15th January 2017 to N.Jones.4@warwick.ac.uk
6. Call for papers Research project and web portal Polyphonie. Mehrsprachigkeit_Kreativität_Schreiben (http://www.polyphonie.at)
The editors Beate Baumann (University of Catania), Michaela Bürger-Koftis (University of Genoa) and Sandra Vlasta (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) kindly invite contributors to send proposals for the multilingual web portal Polyphonie. Mehrsprachigkeit_Kreativität_Schreiben (http://www.polyphonie.at, ISSN 2304-7607).
This international research project investigates the many and diverse connections between multilingualism and creativity in writing systematically and from an interdisciplinary perspective. The aim of the project is to explore the more or less close relationship between individual/social multilingualism and creativity in general, and in particular literary creativity.
On the web portal’s publication platform contributions from the fields of biography studies, research on multilingualism, neurolinguistics, applied linguistics, translation studies, literary studies, comparative studies, media and communication studies are published. New contributions are being published twice a year, the platform is updated in June and December.
Contributors are kindly invited to send their proposals for contributions for the issue to be published in June 2017. The contributions should comply with the web portal’s research focus and correspond to one of the fields present on the web portal. Please send your abstract (500 words) together with your contact details and a short academic CV to the editors (webportalpolyphonie@gmail.it). Contributions are welcome in English, German and Italian.
The final contribution should not exceed 7.000 words and should be introduced by an abstract (max. 100 words) in English.
Deadline for abstracts: February 15, 2017
Acknowledgement by the editors: February 28, 2017
Deadline for contributions: May 5, 2017
7. RECEPTION GROUP FOR GERMAN, AUSTRIAN AND SWISS LITERATURE LECTURE
Thursday, 19 January 2017, 6 pm
Dr Angus Nicholls (Queen Mary, University of London):
The Reception of Goethean Morphology in 19th-Century Britain
Venue: 243, Senate House (2nd floor), Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
ALL WELCOME
8. Researching Multilingually: Possibilities and Complexities (Workshop)
Prue Holmes (Workshop co-ordinator) with Richard Fay, Mariam Attia and Jane Andrews
• Am I allowed to include literature in Turkish?
• What if I conduct my interviews in Mandarin but have to write my thesis in English?
• If I include data in Hindi, how will this affect my word count? How will the thesis be examined?
• Do I transcribe first, then translate, or the other way round?
If you encounter one or more of these questions in your research then this workshop is for you!
This workshop will draw on the experiences and reflections of researchers involved with AHRC-funded projectshttp://researchingmultilingually.com/(AH/J005037/1) and http://researching-multilingually-at-borders.com/(AH/L006936/1) to explore the possibilities for and complexities of what is termed ‘researching multilingually’ — how researchers draw on their own linguistic resources, and those of others, when undertaking research involving more than one language. Workshop participants will be invited to explore and apply these insights to their own research projects. The workshop aims to support developing researcher awareness with regard to practices of researching multilingually and in this way, work towards a more clearly articulated ‘researching multilingually’ methodology.
The overall objectives of the workshop are to:
• introduce participants to the possibilities for and complexities of researching multilingually
• invite participants to consider ethical and other issues where research involving more than one language is concerned
• support participants as they develop their confidence and competence when researching multilingually
• offer participants the space to reflect on their own ‘researching multilingually’ practice
Participants are also encouraged to engage with our online Researcher Network, which continues to inform our understanding of ‘researching multilingually’ researcher practice.
Workshop Programme
11.00 Session 1
What are the possibilities for and complexities of researching multilingually?
An introduction to the concept of ‘researching multilingually’ and its underpinning research
12.00 Session 2
Discussion of case study examples and reflection on your own experiences
13.00 Lunch break
14.30 Session 3
What are the ethical and other considerations which researching multilingually raises?
Reviewing and reflecting on disciplinary and institutional practices
15.30 Tea break
15:45 Session 4
How can you develop your confidence and competence when researching multilingually?
Review of resources and ideas to support your research
16.45 Conclusion
17.00 End
Dr Eleni Philippou
