OCCT HT 2022 - Week 2 Updates
Good afternoon!
To begin with, a reminder to publishers and translators interested in entering this year’s Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize that the deadline for submissions is Monday 31 January. For more information about the prize, please visit our website.
Our next event will take place on Monday of Week 4. Oliver Ready will be discussing his translations of Vladimir Sharov, particularly his recent translation of Be as Children (2021), as well as his translations of nineteenth-century Russian authors, including Gogol and Dostoyevsky.
On Monday of Week 2, we welcomed Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu to our Discussion Group, to lead an exciting and wide-ranging conversation about Shona, colonial linguistics, and Zimbabwe. An engaged and engaging presentation sparked discussion about algorithms, institutional biases, and invented languages. Thank you to everyone who attended!
Calls for Papers and Events
1. Event: Brazil Week 2022
A week of exciting online events to mark the centenary of the Semana de Arte Moderna, featuring conversations with Brazilian authors, seminars, roundtables, and more!
This year the University of Oxford’s Brazil Week commemorates the Centenary of the Semana de Arte Moderna [Modern Art Week]. In February 1922, a group of intellectuals, artists and musicians held an arts festival in São Paulo that introduced audiences to bold new methods of creating, performing and conceptualising Brazilian culture. It was a watershed moment. They re-evaluated the ways in which indigenous peoples and foreign (European) trends influenced Brazilian artists and writers, and developed the metaphor of cannibalism as a positive form of cultural appropriation.
In the original programme there were lectures on art and architecture, concerts and exhibitions. We therefore decided to mark the occasion by recreating the ‘Semana’ by inviting specialists from around the world to talk about the same subjects one hundred years later and to reflect on the legacy of Modernism today.
All events will take place online, via Microsoft Teams, except the Postgraduate Roundtable on Wednesday and the Lecture-Spectacular on Friday.
Registration for events will be via Oxford University's Faculty of Modern Languages website
Please note that registration closes 24 hours before each event.
For more information, please contact the organisers: Claire Williams, Gui Perdiago, or Georgia Seabranasseh
2. Teaching Opportunities at University of West London
Visiting Lecturer(s) needed for two modules (Literary Theory; Contemporary Writers and the City) with a comparative literature dimension. Starting February 14. Please email Garin Dowd for further details.
3.CfPs: Novel Beginnings: Transnational Perspectives on Early Modern Fiction
14-16 September, 2022
University of Huelva, Spain
Though the origins of the novel in English have been reinstated as an object of academic concern in the last thirty years, tackled from the interrelated approaches of history (Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740; Paul Hunter, Before Novels; Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions), genre (Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel) and gender (Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica; Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms), other more recent critical works have engaged with the transnational nature of early modern fiction, situating its inception and development in the context of other national forms and traditions (Margaret Anne Doody, The True History of the Novel; Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients; Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism). With the purpose of reconstructing and interpreting the early days of English prose fiction, we seek to explore its transnational context, attending to the ancient, Eastern and European sources that contributed to its configuration and expansion till the early eighteenth century.
We invite 20-minute papers, panels, and workshops that explore the pan-national nature of the English novel and investigate the relations between the early fiction in English and its foreign sources at different levels, that might include, though not be restricted to, any of the topics below:
- The early English novel in history: sources and texts
- The influence of the ancient novel in early modern fiction
- French nouvelles and English novels: mutual allegiances and liaisons
- Spanish novelas and the picaresque in English early fiction
- Letter exchanges: the early novel and epistolarity
- Eastern influences and orientalist perspectives
- Classic topoi and motifs in the early novel in English
- Towards a transnational theory of the novel
- Political diatribes and religious debates in early prose fiction
- Questions of genre across national borders
- Translation, revision and adaptation
- Intersections of gender and genre
- The European sources of English romances
- Truth, wonder, and the limits of fiction
- Histories of the book: printing, publishing and bookselling across the borders
- Libraries, archives and the digital era
- Boccaccio, Scarron, Cervantes: the great European masters and the novel in English
- Hack-writing and the English novel
- Intergeneric exchanges: drama and the novel
- Popularity, canonicity and the new readership
Keynote speakers:
Professor Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, University of Oxford
Professor Line Cottegnies, Sorbonne Université
Professor Margaret Anne Doody, University of Notre Dame
Professor John A. García Ardila, University of Malta
The submission deadline has been extended. You can submit your proposals (250 words) and a short bio by 1 March, 2022.
4. CfPs: R. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize
*DEADLINE E X T E N D E D: 31 January 2022*
R. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize:
A prize is awarded annually by the Society for French Studies for the best essay submitted by a postgraduate student at a university based in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. The award includes:
- a cash prize of £750
- expenses-paid travel to the next annual conference of the Society for French Studies
- mention in the French Studies Bulletin and on the Society for French Studies website
To be eligible for submission the essay must be:
- entirely the student’s own work and submitted in unrevised form
- written in the previous academic year by a postgraduate student currently registered (or within six months of registration having terminated)
- addressing a topic within the scope of the discipline of French studies
- written in either English or French, with any quotations from French supplied in the original language
- up to 6,000 words in length (including notes but excluding bibliography)
- word-processed with numbered pages
- submitted without the name of the student, or institution, appearing in the essay
- submitted by the university, with the student’s agreement, as one of up to three annual submissions per university
- accompanied by a separate coversheet
- submitted on the understanding that no correspondence will be entered into by the Society regarding individual essays.
If a draft thesis chapter is entered, candidates are reminded to ensure that it can be read as a stand-alone essay. Institutions submitting to the prize should download the coversheet from this page, and submit each essay and coversheet as a separate file to Fionnuala Sinclair. The deadline has now been extended to Monday 31 January 2022.
https://www.sfs.ac.uk/prizes/r-gapper-postgraduate-essay-prize
