Category: Conferences

Deadline: June 19, 2023

We are pleased to share a call for proposals for the upcoming Dmytro Shtohryn International Ukrainian Studies Conference (October 5-7, 2023) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The theme of this year’s conference is Ukrainian Studies Today: History, Memory, Representations, and Collections. For more information, please visit https://uconference.web.illinois.edu/call-for-proposals/. Graduate students, emerging scholars, and scholars based in the region are especially encouraged to participate. Please submit a 200-word abstract by June 19, 2023.

Deadline: August 1, 2023

Event Date: October 28-29, 2023

Abstract Submission Date: August 1, 2023

Organizer: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, USA

A two-day international conference, Re/Framing Eastern European Cinema, will focus on the re-conceptualization of Eastern European cinema and its master narratives before and in the aftermath of the Russian-Ukrainian war of 2022. We will particularly welcome contributions discussing media cultures from the zones of passive and active conflicts in the former communist states constituting the Eastern Bloc.

Participants will interrogate the principal cultural canon, challenge common historical interpretations, and reflect on the visual experiences of displacement and violence in light of the largest military crisis in Europe since WWII. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference will situate the project in relation to the humanities by exploring traditional aspects of the filmmaking (production, distribution, exhibition and reception) and the new regional cultural politics. The main research goal is to shift the optics of our understanding of the essence of Eastern European cinema and conflicts reflected both in its past and present. 

Deadline: June 23, 2023

Call for Papers
Princeton University Graduate Student Conference, October 6-7, 2023
 *To Be Held In-Person*

The Art of Self-Obsession? Interrogating Slavic Ego-Documents and Auto-Fiction

Interrogating his own diaristic output, the young Leo Tolstoy wrote that the “motto” of  his diary “should be ‘not for proof, but for a narrative.’” As this suggests, autobiographical texts – letters, diaries,memoirs, etc. – can possess a poetics all of their own. Now, in the Internet age, such forms proliferate more than ever, radically expanding the remit of what can constitute an ego-document. Spanning
numerous figures and media, from Avvakum, to TikTok, Slavic cultures are saturated with content about the self. Moreover, ego-documents and their poetics form the foundation of seminal scholarly works from the likes of Boris Eikhenbaum and Yuri Tynianov. The “ego-text” in the broadest sense is – perhaps most importantly – a vehicle for self-articulation for those at both the center and margins of culture and society.

We invite submissions that interrogate the boundaries of what constitutes the autobiographical mode, and its poetics, in the Slavic context. How have specific political conditions across Eastern Europe shaped the production of ego-documents, and are there distinctive national and historical forms that emerge from these contexts? What can frameworks that have long been associated with autobiographical writings, such as trauma studies and ideas of postcoloniality, do for readings of Eastern European texts? To what extent can we speak of an ego-document’s formal devices or structure? When, how, and why do autobiographical readings fail? What critical possibilities do such approaches foreclose? We hope to develop and discuss these questions at our conference. 

Deadline: May 1, 2023

West Point Conference on Language, Culture, and Military United States Military Academy West Point, NY September 29 – October 1, 2023

The United States Military Academy’s Department of Foreign Languages (DFL) invites proposals from scholars across cultural and linguistic disciplines for the Inaugural West Point Conference on Language, Culture, and Military, with a focus on representations of military experiences in the humanities. This conference welcomes multiple and diverse approaches at the intersections of language, culture, and aspects of the human experience with a nexus to “military” (such as but not limited to militar, militaire, 軍 jūn, revolution, rebellion, guerrilla, etc.). From Xenophon to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Penthesilea to Joan of Arc, Cervantes to Camões, Erich Maria Remarque to Václav Havel, we witness across all linguistic, literary, and cultural traditions the impact of what one may classify as military (or paramilitary) activities on the broader human experience. We can draw great insight from an analysis of these experiences across all linguistic and cultural traditions, as language reflects, constructs, records, and negotiates key socio-cultural aspects, such as individual and collective identities, conceptualizations of reality, motivations, aesthetics, and historical narratives.

Deadline: May 16, 2023

The Center for Governance and Culture in Europe (GCE-HSG) at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland invites paper proposals for a conference “Environment, Energy and Economy in the Black Sea Region,” to be held in Constanţa, Romania, 14-16 September 2023

The rich and complex history of the Black Sea Region is very much entangled with struggles and conflicts over its resources and with empires and nation-states’ efforts to manage them. Even currently, international energy, grain, and transportation crises caused by the Russian war on Ukraine are closely connected to the Black Sea. In addition to the obvious energy and economic instability, the war creates numerous ecological challenges and is extremely harmful to the environment. These events and threats in the region create a growing demand for platforms for multidisciplinary analysis and expertise. By examining the region’s past and present through various lenses, including politics, governance, economics, social justice, and technology, the conference will contribute to a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the region’s development.

Constanţa, the venue of the event, is an outstanding location for a discussion about the environment, energy, and economy in the region. The city, a former capital of the historical border region Dobruja, has one of the biggest ports on the Black Sea and entered the Danube–Black Sea Canal, a large-scale navigable artificial watercourse.