Category: Conferences/Seminars

Deadline for Submissions: September 01, 2017

Vladimir Nabokov and Translation:
Transatlantic Symposium
Lille, France-Chapel Hill, USA
Spring 2018-Fall 2018

No translator and translation theorist has brought an equal amount of attention to the humble applied craft of literary translation than Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). Standing at the crossroads of five languages and a matching number of literary traditions (English, French, German, Italian, and Russian), he experienced translation on a level unattainable to the majority of his predecessors, presaging and influencing our modern understanding of the indispensability of linguistic and cultural interconnection.

Nabokov’s entered literature as a translator. He claimed to have retold Mayne Reid’s The Headless Horseman in French alexandrines at eleven, while his adaptation of Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon became the most exacting rite of passage of his career in letters. Yet while the controversy stirred by his rendition of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and the methodology of “literalism” he applied therein forever changed the way we conceive of translation today, the totality of his work in translation remains the least appreciated and understood area of Nabokov’s creative enterprise.

To address this omission, Drs. Julie Loison-Charles (University of Lille, France) and Stanislav Shvabrin (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) cordially invite you to submit a 500-word-long abstract explicating Nabokov’s legacy as translator and translation theorist as well as multiple other areas and instances of his engagement with “the art of verbal transmigration.”

We invite scholars interested in the multiple aspects of Nabokov’s legacy in translation to consider the following lines of inquiry:

* Nabokov as translator (with special emphasis on the vast number of works beyond Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Eugene Onegin);
* Nabokov’s translation theory, its evolution, and legacy;
* Translation as reflected in Nabokov’s works;
* Self-translation;
* Nabokov translated (collaboratively with the author and independently) or retranslated;
* Intersemiotic (audiovisual, cinematic, and theatrical) translations of Nabokov’s works;
* Teaching translation with Nabokov;
* The impact of translation on Nabokov’s writing.

The participants invited by the selection committee will have a choice to present their papers either in Lille, France (May 2018) or Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA (Autumn 2018). The two sections of the Symposium will work in concert to facilitate collaboration between participants on both sides of the Atlantic: papers will be made available to participants via a platform (written and/or recorded) and participants will be invited to collaborate when they focus on similar topics, to respond to a paper given in the previous section or to publish a co-authored essay. This platform may also be used to work with graduate or post-graduate students in collaborative transatlantic seminars in translation.

Please send your abstracts (maximum 500 words, in English or French) to the following email addresses:julie.loison-charles@vladimir-nabokov.org and shvabrin@unc.edu

If you wish your abstract to be considered for the first installment of the Symposium in Lille, France, please send your abstract by September 1, 2017, and by May 1, 2018, for Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.

This project is organized with the French Society Vladimir Nabokov – Les Chercheurs Enchantés, The Université of Lille, SHS (France) (Unit Research CECILLE) and the Center for Slavic Eurasian and East European Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA).

Deadline for Submissions: October 06, 2017

You are invited to submit your papers on any topic in Slavic for consideration to the UC Undergraduate Journal of Slavic and East/Central European Studies.  All papers will be subject to peer review.

The submission period is open from now until October 6, 2017.  If you are submitting now, please send your papers to Prof. Roman Koropeckyj, Editor-in-Chief: koropeck@humnet.ucla.edu Whether you are submitting now or later, please also do the following now: email Yelena Furman with your name, preferred email, paper title, and name and email of your advisor so that we have a preliminary headcount:yfurman@humnet.ucla.edu

If you do not feel your paper to be up to the standard necessary to successfully pass peer review, please work with your advisor on revisions before submitting.  Your paper should have a well-formulated and well-developed thesis, with plenty of textual evidence to back it up. When citing a non-English language source, please give the quote in English translation in the body and in the original Slavic language in the footnotes. The papers should be a maximum of 25 double-spaced pages and need to include footnotes and a bibliography (the page limit is inclusive of the bibliography/footnotes).  For the bibliography, please use the Chicago Manual of Style format (you can find a hard copy of CMS in your library and it’s also available online).

If you haven’t seen it yet, please take a look at the journal:

http://web.international.ucla.edu/cwl/slavicjournal/1016

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)”