OCCT has an excellent Trinity term planned! OCCT’s annual crowning event, Oxford Translation Day, takes place in June, with the Weidenfeld Lectures in May. Next week, we’re hosting Writing Histories of Lesser-Known Literatures: Being Poland at TORCH. For more details, for these events and MORE, take a look at our website.

OCCT Review is looking for editors! OCCT Review is a journal reviewing new books and trends in the fields of comparative criticism and translation studies, aiming to produce reviews quickly and to provoke debate. We encourage graduate students or early-career academics to join the OCCT Review team! Contact Eleni at Comparative.Criticism@st-annes.ox.ac.uk to find out how to apply!

Events, Funding, and CFPs

1. Mind Reading 2019: Adolescence, Literature, and Mental Health

 St Anne’s College, Oxford

17th May, 2019

This one-day programme of talks and workshops will bring together literary and humanities scholars with service users and practitioners in the field of child and adolescent mental health. Together we will ask questions about the role of literature as a point of therapeutic
engagement in caring for children, adolescents, and young people.

We are interested in how literature might play a role when we experience pain, trauma, and stress, as well as the ways in which literature might be employed as a tool to improve communication and foster understanding between medical learners, healthcare providers, service users, and family members.

The programme can be found below, to book your place please visit https://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/conferences-and-events/english-faculty/events/mind-reading-2019-adolescence-literature-and-mental-health

9.30 – 10.00 Arrival and Registration

10.00 – 10.10 Welcome and Introduction

10.10 – 11.10 First Keynote Address
Joanne Dunphy (Vice Principal, Oxford Spires Academy), ‘Being Heard’

11.10 – 11.30 Coffee Break

11.30 – 1.00 Presentations
Dr Mina Fazel (Associate Professor in Psychiatry, University of Oxford), ‘Adolescence and Authority: Exploring the Contradictory Messages Young People Navigate in Mental Healthcare’

Dr Gordon Bates (MBChB, MMedSc; PhD Candidate at the University of Birkbeck), ‘”A Lot of You Cared, Just Not Enough”: Teen Suicide in Popular Culture’
Dr Edward Harcourt (Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford and Director of Research, AHRC), ‘Emotional Self-Regulation and Autonomy’

1.00 – 2.00 Lunch

2.00 – 3.10 Presentations
Dr Gaby Illingworth and Dr Rachel Sharman (Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences), ‘The Teensleep Study: Sleep Education in UK Schools’
Students from Oxford Spires Academy, ‘Poems from a School”

3.10 – 3.40 Coffee

3.40 – 4.50 Presentations
Dr Jacqueline Yallop (Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University), ‘Writing Pain Wales: Working with Creative Writing and Chronic Pain’
Professor Brendan Stone (Deputy Vice-President for Education, The University of Sheffield), ‘”I Travelled Deeper into the Heart of an Extraordinary World”: Reflections on Entering into “Psychosis”‘

4.50 – 5.50 Second Keynote Address
Dr Barbara-Anne Wren (Consultant Psychologist, Royal Free London NHS Trust), ‘Paying Attention to Meaning: Using Narrative to Understand the Experience of Caring for Children and Young People’

5.50 – 6.00 Closing Comments
6.00 Drinks Reception

The conference is hosted by Dr Melissa Dickson (Birmingham), Dr Elizabeth Barrett (University College Dublin) and Professor Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford).

https://diseasesofmodernlife.org/2019/03/18/event-mind-reading-2019-adol...

2. The School of European Languages, Cultures and Society (SELCS) at UCL is inviting applications for a Lectureship in Comparative Cultural Studies. The salary range will be £43,884 - £51,769 per annum, inclusive of London Allowance. The successful candidate is expected to take up the position on 1 September 2019 or as soon as possible thereafter.

We specifically welcome applications from candidates with a PhD and/or proven research record in Comparative Literature, provided that this includes expertise in one of the languages we teach (as stated in the Job Description) or in Arabic or Mandarin Chinese. Experience in teaching undergraduate or postgraduate modules in relation to the language specialism is essential, and research and teaching experience in the areas of ageing, disability, gender, race or class is desirable.

Applicants should apply online. To access further details about the position and how to apply please click here:

https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BRH304/lecturer-in-comparative-cultural-studies

3. Call for Papers for the Panel:
Performing Identity: The Relationship between Identity and Performance in Literature, Theatre and the Performing Arts

As part of 9th Euroacademia International Conference: Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers

Dublin, Ireland, 31st of May and 1st of June 2019
Deadline for paper proposals: 2nd of May 2019

Performing Identity: The Relationship between Identity and Performance in Literature, Theatre and the Performing Arts

Panel proposed by Dr. Panayiota Chrysochou, The University of Cyprus

Panel Description:
Identity is often seen as being a controversial topic. Whether it is fictive or real, (de)politicized and/or aesthetic, gendered or engendered, identity is often seen as being a powerful political tool and an essentially social construct. It also allows individuals to define themselves. In a sense, we perform our own identities everyday - or, perhaps, we perform a wide range of different identities at any one time. We implicitly live in a society which constructs various definitive identifications, and which often sees the rigid maintenance of hierarchical systems and exclusive ideological constructions of gender, identity and sexuality, or what Judith Butler defines in her work Bodies that Matter as an 'exclusionary matrix.' This has often resulted in the displacement of any discursive systems which resist these exclusionary systems. This panel seeks to give voice to discursive systems which have so often been displaced by exclusionary systems of identification. The main exclusionary focus in culture and the arts has often been on the white, heterosexual and supremacist male (or female). To rectify this oversight, this panel seeks to address any works of art and culture which are directly and explicitly related to the performance of identity from a different standpoint - that is, one which is not exclusively heteronormative and heterosexual.

We welcome any papers focusing non-exclusively on the following topics:

1. Identity as a performative and political tool and/or as a site of political resistance and change
2. The work of gay/lesbian or drag performance artists who do not form part of the white, male/female and heterosexual/heteronormative matrix
3. Identity as a fluid and shifting construct in the theatre, the performing arts and literature generally
4. Cultural and literary works or works of art which resist fixed identifications and engender performative meanings/ways of 'reading'
5. The abject as a site of identification
6. Gender and identity formation
7. Sexuality as a performative and identificatory construct or mode of identification.

Please apply on-line or submit abstracts of less than 300 words together with the details of affiliation by 2nd of May 2019 to application@euroacademia.org

For complete details please see the conference website:
http://euroacademia.eu/conference/9eio/

4. Event at Pushkin House, 11 June!!. The short-story writer Maxim Osipov will be speaking together with me and two of his translators: Alex Fleming and Boris Dralyuk:

http://www.pushkinhouse.org/events/2019/5/9/kyd4eaw0fkggm1c88a8idthgcb5s4m

5. 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 and didactics of foreign languages 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 December 2019. 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.com). Contributions are welcome in English, French, 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: May 15, 2019
Acknowledgement by the editors: May 24, 2019
Deadline for contributions: September 30, 2019

6. SOCIETY FOR PIRANDELLO STUDIES: ESSAY COMPETITIONS

The Society for Pirandello Studies invites entries into two essay competitions, one for undergraduates and the other for bona fide postgraduate students.

The life and/or writings of Luigi Pirandello shall constitute at least half of the essay’s subject; e.g. a balanced discussion of Pirandello and one other writer is acceptable.

After initial consultation with a tutor or supervisor the essay must be the entrant’s own unaided work.

Entries are acceptable from anywhere in the world, but the essay must be written in English. It must not exceed 3,000 words in length if entered into the undergraduate competition or 5,000 if entered into the postgraduate competition.

No abstract is required. A bibliography may be appended at the competitor’s discretion and is not included in the word-count.

The essay must adhere to the style of Pirandello Studies, or of the MHRA or the MLA.

The essay must be submitted electronically to sps.essay.competition@gmail.com by 1 July 2019. By the same date a message must be sent to the same address by the entrant’s tutor or supervisor stating that the entrant is a registered undergraduate or a bona fide postgraduate student and that, as far as the writer is aware, beyond initial consultation the essay is the entrant’s own unaided work.

The entry must be submitted as a Word document in the font Times New Roman, 12-point.

The entry must indicate for which competition it is intended and include the entrant’s name, the academic institution where they are registered and the name and e-mail address of their tutor/supervisor.

The prize in each competition will be publication of the winning essay in the Society’s journal Pirandello Studies, volume 40 (2020), whose editor may advise the author about modifications prior to publication.

In each competition the judges reserve the right to award no prize if they deem no entry to have reached an appropriate standard.

The results of the competitions will be communicated by electronic mail to all entrants by 2 September 2019.

The judges’ decisions will be final and no correspondence about them will be entered into.

7. The School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary, University of London is happy to announce the Jill Forbes MA Bursary for Comparative Literature with French.

Thanks to the generosity of the late Jill Forbes - a former chair of French at Queen Mary, and a leading figure in French studies both nationally and internationally - we are able to offer a £3000 discount on the tuition fees of ONE full-time UK or EU MA student specializing in a field relating to French studies, for the academic year 2019/20.

Applicants must have French as a named subject in their first degree (completed or due for completion in 2019), and propose a dissertation project that includes a substantial French/Francophone element. Applicants are invited to submit a short dissertation research proposal (no more than 300 words in English or French) and a covering letter together with their application.
 

If eligible candidates have already submitted an application to the MA programme and wish to apply for the discount, they should submit a dissertation proposal and covering letter directly to Shital Pravinchandra at:
s.pravinchandra@qmul.ac.uk
 

Applications may be made via the taught postgraduate course finder at: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/taught/