Category: Conferences/Seminars

Deadline for Submissions: May 31, 2017

1917: Revolution, Radicalism, and Resistance in the Atlantic World
18^th Annual International Graduate Student
Conference on Transatlantic History
The University of Texas at Arlington
Date of Conference: October 19-21, 2017
Submission Deadline: May 31

Keynote Speakers: Dr. Erik S. McDuffie & Dr. Julia L. Mickenberg

The Transatlantic History Student Organization, in collaboration with Phi Alpha Theta, the Barksdale Lecture Series, the History Department, the Africa Program and the College of Liberal Arts, is sponsoring the Eighteenth Annual International Graduate Student Conference on Transatlantic History.

Transatlantic history examines the circulation and interaction of people, goods, and ideas between and within any of the four continents surrounding the Atlantic basin between the time of the first Atlantic contacts in the 1400s and the present day. Situated primarily in the fields of social and cultural history, its approaches are problem-oriented in scope, and highlighted by comparative and transnational frameworks.

We invite papers and panel submissions that are historical, geographical, anthropological, literary, sociological, and cartographic in nature—including interdisciplinary and digital humanities projects—that fall within the scope of transatlantic studies from both graduate students and young scholars. We will accept submissions for papers written in English, French, Spanish, and German.

The theme of this year’s conference is the impact of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 on the Atlantic World, examining the political, social, cultural, and economic reverberations and legacies prompted by the collapse of Russia’s ancien régime and the consolidation of Soviet/Bolshevik power. Inspiring hope and terror abroad, this conference aims to analyze the various transnational and international dimensions of the Russian Revolutions and how they shaped social and political movements in the Atlantic World, both directly and by virtue of establishing a new geopolitical context. Continue reading “CFP: 1917: Revolution, Radicalism, and Resistance in the Atlantic World (UT-Arlington)”

Deadline for Proposals: June 01, 2017

Call for Proposals for Working Group Imagining an Other “Eastern Europe”: Performances of Difference in Central-Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia

American Society for Theater Research Conference 2017, November 16-19, Atlanta, Georgia

In Inventing Eastern Europe, Larry Wolff describes how eighteenth-century, European Enlightenment ideals created an ideological construct called “Eastern Europe.” As Wolff explains, this construct served as a monstrous mirror to the equally new construct of “Western Europe.” Though amorphous, the geography of “Eastern Europe” stretched from Prague to Moscow, into territory we now think of as Russia and the former Soviet Bloc. This area became an extraordinary part of Europe: neither Orient nor Occident, neither entirely civilized nor entirely barbaric, neither recognizable in custom nor entirely alien. It was “Europe,” but seen through an exoticized frame. For example, in his musings on Eastern Europe, Voltaire wrote of a “[Western] Europe that knows things” and an Eastern Europe that “waited to become known.” In so doing, Voltaire evinced himself of the Enlightenment desire to classify and master, and to situate “Eastern Europe” as a mysterious terra incognita. The “Western” compulsion to master “Eastern Europe” has not been historically limited to cultural and imperial domination. Anne McClintock writes, in Imperial Leather, of “an erotics of ravishment” in the narrative of male travel and territorial expansion. The imperial desire McClintock speaks of extended to Eastern Europe’s “extraordinary bodies.” Drawing from historical letters and travelogues, Wolff details bodily incursions the West made into Eastern Europe. This includes Giacomo Casanova—bon vivant of the Italian Renaissance—purchasing a thirteen-year-old Russian sex slave.

The ideological creation of Eastern Europe as an exotic “Other” of Western Europe was built on cultural, economic, and linguistic boundaries, and was carried through to the twentieth-century when in 1946 Winston Churchill described an “Iron Curtain” dividing the continent. The remainder of the twentieth century continued this division through the rhetoric and politics of the Cold War. According to Wolff, Eastern Europe transformed into a construct onto which “Westerners” could place their views of politics, economics, sociological thought, and racial theories. Eastern Europe was not—and has not been—an objective reality for them, but, instead, a way to legitimize notions of “civilization.” Today, this notion persists. According to rhetoric coming out of the U.S. intelligence community, a new Cold War is being fought in cyberspace with “Eastern Europe” caught between the so-called civilized/democratic “West” and a barbaric/autocratic “Russia.” Likewise, the idea of Eastern Europe/Russia being a place for sexual deviance continues with the New York Times recently releasing the “salacious” details of the 45th President’s sexual activities in Moscow. Regardless of the veracity of these reports, it is incontrovertible that the current U.S. President sees himself as a modern day Casanova, who stands before the world with his second Eastern European bride at his side. Thus, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the so-called West has utilized the construct of Eastern Europe as a fetishized “Other,” both philosophically and bodily. Continue reading “CFP: Imagining an Other “Eastern Europe”: Performances of Difference in Central-Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia (Atlanta, Georgia)”

Deadline for Submissions: April 15, 2017

The AATSEEL National Meeting is a forum for scholarly exchange of ideas in all areas of Slavic and East/Central European languages, literatures, linguistics, cultures, and pedagogy. The Program Committee invites scholars in these and related areas to form panels around specific topics, organize roundtable discussions, propose forums on instructional materials, and/or submit proposals for individual presentations for the 2018 Conference, which will be held on February 1-4, 2018 in Washington, DC.

Continue reading “CFP: 2018 Call for Papers (AATSEEL)”

Deadline for Submissions: May 15, 2017

CALL FOR PAPERS
MULTICULTURALISM AND LANGUAGE CONTACT:
An International Scholarly Conference organized by
the Max van der Stoel Institute at South East European University &
the Research Center for Areal Linguistics at the Macedonian Academy of Arts & Sciences

Balkan peoples in the course of centuries of living in a multicultural and multilingual
environment have attempted to interpret the world around them in a common fashion while at the same time preserving a variety of distinctive features, such as language and dialect. Significant cultural interactions, especially during the attested period of the Balkan Linguistic League, have brought about the convergence of inherited linguistic structures in the respective Balkan languages combined with varieties of common lexical elements, all conducive to more effective communication among the peoples involved.

At a time when some political actors are seeking to convince various publics that “they have nothing a common” (a phrase deployed stridently during the Yugoslav Wars of Succession), this conference seeks to bring new perspectives to the roles of multiculturalism and language contact as vital factors in mutual understanding and a shared worldview, a topic that is both timely and in need of deeper scholarly engagement. Papers dealing with the peoples and languages of the Balkans (as well as Balkan peoples and languages living beyond the Balkans) are especially welcome, but any paper relevant to the main themes of the conference is eligible to be submitted for consideration (see below). Continue reading “CFP: Multiculturalism and Language Contact (Tetovo, Macedonia)”

Deadline for Applications: May 15, 2017

UC BERKELEY REVOLUTIONARY CENTENARY WORKSHOP
CALL FOR PAPERS

100 Years Later: The Russian Revolution and its Consequences
October 6-7, 2017
www.berkeley1917.wordpress.com

“The Soviet socialist revolution was the great utopian adventure of the modern age,” wrote the late Berkeley professor Martin Malia in the opening to his 1994 book The Soviet Tragedy. Utopian and pragmatic, top-down and bottom-up, tragic and fortunate: historians have affixed many adjectives to the year 1917 to describe it and its impact on Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the wider world. Long before the opening of the Russian archives in the early nineties, scholars have spilled much ink to debate the Revolution’s origins and causes, goals and shortcomings, beginning and end. Nearly all historians agree that the Revolution stands virtually unrivaled in its ambition, influence, and global legacy.

To mark the Revolution’s centenary, the University of California, Berkeley will host a workshop where graduate students in the dissertation writing phase can present and receive feedback on work that relates to the theme of the Russian Revolution and its consequences, broadly defined. How did the ideas, actors, and events that undergirded the Bolshevik program reverberate across the Soviet Union and beyond? In what ways did Soviet socialism serve as a model for non-Soviet governments, revolutionaries, reformers, and other elites to follow, reject, or improve upon? What effect did the collapse have on socialist and non-socialist governments, and what role does memory of the Soviet past play in the former USSR and beyond today? We welcome chronological diversity (from 1917 to the present), regional variation (Russia and the Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, North America and Asia), and thematic range (political, social, economic, environmental, scientific, intellectual, etc.). Our goal is to bring together young scholars from universities across the United States whose work is adding to and changing the way we think, research, and write about the world that 1917 forged.  Continue reading “CFP: Revolutionary Centenary Workshop (UC Berkeley)”

Deadline for Submission: April 1, 2017

CALL FOR PAPERS
Accelerated development? Socio-political landslides, cultural ruptures and literary history in Eastern Europe (Ghent University, Ghent, September 29 – October 1, 2017)

In 1964 the Bulgarian-Belarusian-Russian scholar Georgii Gachev coined the term ‘uskorennoe razvitie’ or ‘accelerated development’ in his 1964 monograph Accelerated Development of Literature: On the Basis of the Bulgarian Literature of the First Half of the 19th Century.  The term describes what happened to Bulgarian literature during Ottoman rule. Being a ‘young’ and ‘peripheral’ literature, having started to develop only recently at the time, Bulgarian literature ‘had to’ go through the whole evolution of European literature at a high pace in order to catch up with the latter. One of the side effects of this accelerated development was that characteristics of different style periods could even co-occur. Gachev’s thought-provoking idea has never really received a lot of attention, except in Bulgarian studies, where the concept was elaborated, criticized and / or gave way to new theories (Petar Dinekov, Nikolai Genchev, Roumen Daskalov, Alexander Kiossev …), but mostly with regard to the development of Bulgarian culture and society.

Today Gachev’s theory seems outdated, not in the least for its centralist assumptions – i.e. taking for granted that central cultures take the lead and peripheral cultures follow suit – that form the very basis of the Eurocentric theory. Nonetheless, the potential of the very kernel of the concept is obvious – both for dealing with the literary histories of other ‘young’ and/or ‘peripheral’ literatures in different time periods and for challenging the different notions that form the basis of Gachev’s theory – ‘peripheral’, ‘young’, ‘Western’, ‘dominant’, ‘oppression’, ‘conservatism’. ‘Accelerated development’ may be a suitable term to describe how Western literary critics in the 19th century thought about the quickly evolving, ‘peripheral’ Russian literature of the time. ‘Accelerated development’ may also be applied to the evolution of (certain) Modernist movements in the ‘peripheral’ Eastern Europe. And what to say about the apparent fast-forward evolution of the East-European literatures after the collapse of Communism, quickly adapting Postmodernism, Magical Realism, and other literary trends that other, ‘central’ literatures had been going through earlier?

This conference aims to explore – i.e., to corroborate, to challenge or to further develop – the concept of accelerated development by looking at concrete cases in the literary histories of Eastern Europe where one can speak of a major rupture, such as suddenly acquired cultural independence or freedom or technological evolution, that causes the literature to change course and, possibly, to ‘accelerate’. More specifically, this conference hopes to find new ways to look at the complex relationships between dominant and non- or less-dominant, central and peripheral, old and young literatures and cultures, colonizing and colonized cultures, progressive and conservative cultures, open and oppressive / repressive cultures, etc. Additionally, the conference aims to discuss the (catalytic) role of cultural agents in the process of accelerated development and the tension(s) between literary and extra-literary motivations. Lastly, the conference hopes to shed light on how cultures going through an accelerated development look at their earlier selves and whether, and if so, how accelerated developments may also lead to new, ‘own’ literary forms that are not quite related to the seemingly dominant cultures.

The keynote speakers include Raymond Detrez (Belgium), Galin Tihanov (UK) and Willem G. Weststeijn (The Netherlands).

The conference will take place at Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, on September 29 – October 1, 2017. Please send your abstract of approximately 400 words together with your short CV (no more than one page) to the conference organizers. The deadline for proposals is April 1, 2017. Notification of acceptance of proposals will be provided by May, 2017. Queries and proposals should be sent to the conference organizers.

Ben Dhooge (Ben.Dhooge@UGent.be), Michel De Dobbeleer (Michel.DeDobbeleer@UGent.be), Miglena Dikova-Milanova (Miglena.DikovaMilanova@UGent.be) & Dennis Ioffe (Dennis.Ioffe@UGent.be) Department of Languages and cultures, Section of Slavic and East European Studies Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
http://www.slavistiek.ugent.be/Accelerateddevelopment