Lo spazio, e in particolare lo spazio urbano, costituisce un elemento narrativovisuale caratterizzante della letteratura a fumetti sin dalla sua nascita. Per lungo tempo, gli autori di fumetti hanno privilegiato un’ambientazione cittadina per le loro opere, e si sono rivolti implicitamente a un pubblico che, per stile di vita e modalità di consumo del fumetto in quanto ‘prodotto’ dell’industria culturale, non poteva che essere pienamente urbanizzato.

Accanto a questa rappresentazione ha guadagnato terreno anche l’interesse per lo spazio interno o domestico, dalla casa allo studio d’artista, dal condominio all’ospizio, dal carcere all’ospedale. Si tratta di spazi di vario tipo: familiari, collettivi, sociali o solipsistici, interagiscono in ogni caso con la narrazione, determinandone a volte l’intero impianto narrativo. Non ambientazioni neutre, dunque, ma al pari dello spazio urbano, spazi decisivi per la gestione della narrazione e dei personaggi che vi si muovono.

Infine, oltre all’accezione narratologica dello spazio rappresentato, nel caso del fumetto occorre considerare, con specificità proprie e per certi versi complementari, quella dello spazio come materia semiotica. Il fumetto non si limita, infatti, a raffigurare gli spazi, ma produce sulla superficie piana della pagina una spazialità propria, che rimette in gioco e spesso ridefinisce radicalmente le nostre coordinate di percezione e rappresentazione dello spazio.

In che modo lo spazio viene tematizzato e trasformato, potenziato o depotenziato, nella narrazione a fumetti ? In quale misura il fumetto riscrive e reinventa lo spazio offrendosi come luogo di una riconfigurazione possibile, o utopica, o fantastica delle coordinate spaziali? In che modo tale riconfigurazione incide sui dispositivi di percezione? E ancora, come si modifica la rappresentazione della spazialità a fumetti entro la rete delle trasformazioni transmediali in corso?

Queste sono le principali domande da cui il convegno SPAZI TRA LE NUVOLE prende le mosse, chiamando studiose e studiosi a confrontarsi sul tema dello spazio nella narrazione a fumetti, sullo sfondo del più generale paesaggio narrativo e transmediale contemporaneo. Le proposte d’intervento approvate, che possono affrontare l’argomento secondo i più diversi approcci teorico-critici, saranno discusse durante il convegno in sessioni coordinate dai respondent individuati dal comitato scientifico.

Il programma delle attività prevede, inoltre, una sessione di incontro con gli autori – Sara Colaone e Manuele Fior – e due sessioni speciali, in forma laboratoriale, che si prefiggono di indagare i temi, rispettivamente, della città e della casa. Le sessioni laboratoriali intendono costituire delle occasioni di confronto puntuale sui testi e sono perciò aperte in modo particolare a proposte di intervento incentrate sulle opere a fumetti indicate di seguito.

La città
Andrea Pazienza, Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal (1982)
Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (2004)

La casa
Richard McGuire, Here (2014)
Paco Roca, La casa (2015)

Le proposte di intervento, di circa 500 parole, devono essere corredate da una breve nota bio-bibliografica dell’autore e da un’essenziale bibliografia teoricocritica. È possibile partecipare con due interventi nel caso in cui uno riguardi le sessioni laboratoriali. La proposta di partecipazione deve essere inviata entro il 31 maggio 2017 a spazi.nuvole@unica.it. L’accettazione verrà comunicata entro il 30 giugno 2017.

Gli interventi al convegno potranno accedere a una pubblicazione peer-reviewed. La scadenza per l’invio della versione definitiva degli articoli è il 30 dicembre 2017. 

The Department of American Literature of the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in collaboration with the Hellenic Association for American Studies (HELAAS), invite scholars to submit proposals for the international conference ―The Politics of Space and the Humanities‖ to be held in Thessaloniki.

The latest socio-cultural and political developments on both sides of the Atlantic have again placed space at the center of attention of current scholarship in the Humanities. The relation between places, people, and geographies as caused by immigration, migration and refugee flows, demographic changes, war tensions and conflicts, environmental disasters, urban expansion, and mapping technologies has always been dynamic. Nowadays, finding ourselves in the midst of change, we need to reconsider the politicized nature of space, its impact on individuals and the shaping of identity in a number of contexts within Anglophone literary and artistic production that open up the Humanities to numerous other disciplines and spatial interactions.

We invite individual abstracts and panel proposals from scholars, researchers and artists in an array of subjects (without being restricted to) in any of the proposed topics below:

– Literary geographies

– Imagined spaces

– Performing space

– Photographic, cinematic, visual and typographic representations of space

– Geopolitics

– Space and Globalization

– Space and surveillance

– Urban mappings and ethnicity

– Architextural spaces

– Media and environment

– RPG games

– Space-narrative-gaming

Abstracts and/or panel proposals should be submitted by May 1st, 2017.

Please include the following in your submission:

– Name

– Affiliation (if any)

– Email address

– Title of Abstract or Panel Proposal

– Abstract (250 words)

– Bio

Please address e-mails to: trapatz@enl.auth.gr (Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou); detsi@enl.auth.gr (Dr. Zoe Detsi).

Applications are now open for the 2017 History Scholar Award

Each year, the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s History Scholar Award honors college juniors and seniors who have demonstrated academic excellence in American history or American studies.

History Scholars spend a week in New York City, where they attend lectures by eminent historians, go behind the scenes at The Gilder Lehrman Collection, and take historical walking tours.

Interested in applying for the History Scholar Award or know an outstanding college junior or senior? Please visit www.gilderlehrman.org/hsa, share this email, or send us their name and email address, and we will follow up.

The application deadline is March 30, 2017. Please email or call (646) 366-9666 x17 if you have any questions.

We hope to see you this summer!

Education Department
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

 

SPECIAL GUESTS: Frank Costigliola (University of Connecticut) Michael Cullinane (Northumbria University) Mario Del Pero (SciencesPo) Sylvia Ellis (University of Roehampton) Petra Goedde (Temple University) Justin Hart (Texas Tech University) Lisa McGirr (Harvard University) Kiran Patel (University of Maastricht)

Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin Roosevelt are three of the most inspiring and dynamic political leaders in 20th century US history. Theodore and Franklin both redefined the presidency and political leadership, each in their unique way. Eleanor, the first modern First Lady, as a widow became a prominent media personality and advocate of political causes such as human rights and the anti-nuclear movement. Each of the three Roosevelts had a specific impact, influence, and legacy, shaping the foreign and domestic policy of the United States, and the relations between the US and the world, through the twentieth century and beyond.

The Rooseveltian Century is a new concept for contemporary history. The nearest equivalent is the idea of the Wilsonian Century, based on the worldview of President Woodrow Wilson and how he conceived of US power being used to shape world politics through WWI (‘making the world safe for democracy’). In contrast, the Rooseveltian Century examines the three Roosevelts as a ‘collective agent’ who, through both domestic and foreign policies, changed our understanding of the responsibilities of government and the global role of the United States. This mean that the Rooseveltian Century, as a historical frame, makes use of the three Roosevelts to view, critically consider and explore key themes in US history and international relations, without necessarily stating that the three acted in unison or that they expressed the same views or policies.

This conference builds on the experimental MOOC, ‘The Rooseveltian Century’, produced by Giles Scott-Smith and Dario Fazzi in 2016. The event, the first to be held at the newly-founded Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, has two main purposes. Firstly, it will uniquely combine research on each of the three principal Roosevelts within an overarching historical investigation into their influence and legacies. Secondly, it will frame the debate around the central themes, motifs and images that can be represented by the term Rooseveltian Century, identifying the longer-lasting meaning and importance of this frame in current-day (international) politics.

 

PROPOSALS Paper proposals on the following topics are welcome: 1) Domestic and International Public Policy – which fields were initiated, shaped, or heavily influenced by the Roosevelts; 2) ‘Rooseveltian Transfer’ – how public policy initiatives were taken up by and shared between the Roosevelts and their supporters; 3) Who Influences Who – the roots of Rooseveltian idealism and realism; 4) Public Memory – how the Roosevelts both shaped their own public legacies and have been used by advocates (and adversaries) to represent distinct identities and causes in the public realm; 5) Partisan Politics – how the Roosevelts influenced socio-political and party-based activism; 6) Style and Media – how the Roosevelts responded to and used a changing media environment for their personal and political purposes; 7) Institutions and Alliances – how did the Roosevelts transform US foreign relations and the US role in the world; 8) Principles and Values – how did the Roosevelts broaden conceptions and understanding of such ideals as democracy, freedom, and equality?

DEADLINES Please send a 250-word proposal, together with a CV, to rooseveltiancentury@gmail.com. The deadline for paper proposals is 31 March 2017.

Draft papers of 5000 words will be required no later than 1 November 2017, in time for circulation to all participants prior to the conference. For all enquiries please contact Giles Scott-Smith.

Association Française d’Etudes Américaines (AFEA) / French Association for American Studies
 
Call for Presentations
 
The French Association for American Studies invites doctoral students in American studies to take part in the Graduate Symposium (“Doctoriales”) specifically organized on their behalf during its annual conference. This year’s workshops will be held on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 (9am-5pm) at University of Strasbourg (France). The conference will take place on June 7 to 9, 2017. For further information, please check our website: http://www.afea.fr
 
Since 2008, the AFEA has been encouraging the internationalization of its Graduate Student Symposium by offering grants (up to 500 euros each) for a maximum of ten European candidates (other than French) to help cover their travel expenses. All students are, in addition, invited to attend the whole conference free of registration charges. The symposium provides an opportunity for PhD students to present their research in a less formal session than that of a full conference panel, and confront it to that of other European scholars. Doctoral students may be at an early or more advanced stage of their research. The proposals will be responded to by professors specializing in related fields. Candidates are invited to give their presentations in English within one of the two workshops offered: 1) American literature, or 2) American “civilization” (history, sociology, political science…). Proposals relevant to both fields (film studies, visual arts or music, for instance), or to another field (such as translation studies or linguistics) can be sent to either of the co-chairs.
 
Applications
 
Candidates must send a Curriculum Vitae and a 500-word abstract summarizing their dissertation proposal, plus an estimated budget of traveling expenses and funding otherwise available to them. They must mention when they began their PhD, and the name and affiliation of their advisor.
 
– Proposals in civilization must be sent electronically to Professor Romain Huret (Romain.Huret@ehess.fr).
 
– Proposals in literature must be sent electronically to both Professors Françoise palleau-papin (francoise.palleau@wanadoo.frand Mathieu Duplay  (mduplay@club-internet.fr)
 
Deadline for application : February 15, 2017. The symposium organizers will respond to all applicants by March 15, 2017.
 
Professors Françoise Palleau-Papin, Mathieu Duplay, Romain Huret.

La sessione del prossimo Congresso Geografico promossa da Fabio Amato, Elena dell’Agnese e Chiara Giubilaro, avrà come titolo “Media e Geografia“. 

La sessione verterà sul ruolo dei media nella costruzione di immaginari geografici e sarà aperta a tutte le proposte sul tema. Per esempio, seguendo le tre sotto-sessioni tematiche:

– Nostra patria è il mondo intero: geo-grafie e metafore dello spazio politico nelle canzoni di protesta e contro la guerra (a cura di Elena dell’Agnese)

– Migrazioni: un approccio visuale (a cura di Chiara Giubilaro)

– Ma l’America è lontana: geografie e geopolitiche della serialità oltre gli States (a cura di Fabio Amato)

Link alla call: 
http://www.congressogeografico.it/sessione/s32/

Form da compilare per inoltrare le proposte di contributo entro il 15 febbraio 2017:
http://www.congressogeografico.it/invio-abstract/

This conference will examine the political and cultural significance of Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, and consider the first 100 days of his administration.

Speakers include: Robert Brigham (Vassar College), Scott Lucas (University of Birmingham/EAWorldview), Diane Negra (University College Dublin), Inderjeet Parmar (City, University of London), Donald E. Pease (Dartmouth College).

Topics may include but are not confined to:  

“Make America Great Again” – American exceptionalism, nostalgia

“America First” – foreign policy and diplomacy

“Protect our borders” – immigration and terrorism

“Drain the swamp” – Washington elites, lobbying and corruption

A historic movement” – white nationalism, identity politics, protest

“American carnage” – dystopian visions of the US, narratives of decline

“Crime and gangs and guns” – race and the cities, gun violence, civic anxiety

“Fake news” – politics in the new media age, post-truth, alternative facts

“I have great respect for women” – gender and politics, misogyny, civility

“I am very rich” – inequality, wealth, class

I’ll be so presidential” – celebrity, reality tv, satire

Bing, bing, bong, bong” – Trump’s language, rhetoric

Buy American and hire American” – trade, protectionism

“Brexit’s a great thing” – transatlantic relations, populism, ethnonationalism

 

We welcome individual papers but also proposals for panels, workshops or alternative sessions for presentation and discussion. Please send a brief CV and summary proposal (300 words max.) by 10th March 2017 to Prof. Liam Kennedy at liam.kennedy@ucd.ie

 

 

Three semester interdisciplinary program taught in English and aimed at graduate students from around the world (Performance-related two-semester fast-track-option available). It offers inside knowledge of the United States from an outside perspective.

Application deadline: March 31, 2017.

The MAS is a preeminent interdisciplinary program that attracts talented and ambitious graduate students from around the world.

The PROGRAM offers exemplary and interdisciplinary teaching that provides students with in-depth cultural knowledge about the United States of America.

The CURRICULUM includes a selection of courses from economics, geography, history, law, literature, musicology, philosophy, political science, religious studies, and sociology.

MAS STUDENTS will benefit both from excellent academic teaching by internationally renowned scholars and from an interdisciplinary approach that meets the needs of future leaders.

ADMISSION is competitive and most candidates will have studied humanities, social sciences, or law at the undergraduate or graduate level. The program admits up to 30 students every year. Applicants from outside of the EU should have successfully completed degree programs involving a minimum of four years of study at recognized academic institutions.

Further information on the Heidelberg Center and its MAS program, as well as the online application are available at http://www.hca.uni-heidelberg, orhttp://www.mas.uni-hd.de.

Open Cultural Studies New Peer-Reviewed Journal by De Gruyter

Editors: Dr Anna Pochmara, Dr Justyna Wierzchowska

Andrew Ross, in his now classic text “Uses of Camp,” points to Prince and Michael Jackson and their polysexual identities as emblematic of camp aesthetics yet completely neglects the significance of the race factor in their campiness. In turn, he fails to consider the connection between camp and race. According to Pamela Robertson, one of the very few authors who have explored this fascinating intersection, this is characteristic for discourse on camp in general. Critics tend to compare camp to black culture or to blackface, but they do not explore race as inherent in or significant for camp aesthetics. This glaring gap in critical discourse is largely connected with the regime of authenticity that limited many studies of black culture and has been recently challenged by works such as G. A. Jarret’s Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (2006) or Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature (2011). The focus on racial authenticity in black culture has led to the privileging of texts explicitly embedded in historical discourses, such as slave narratives, and to the marginalization of, especially nineteenth-century, fiction, and particularly texts parading non-black, white-looking, or racially indefinite characters (cf. Maria Giulia Fabi, Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel, 2001). This exclusion of a vast body of largely womenauthored texts, frequently featuring mulatta protagonists, has been problematized in numerous, mostly feminist studies since 1987, when Hazel Carby published the canonical Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. These feminist explorations, however, have mostly focused on the mulatta figure and the phenomenon of passing in literature and have never used camp as an analytical tool. On Uses of Black Camp, a 2017 special issue of Open Cultural Studies, aims to fill in this lack in critical discourses of both camp and black cultures, to help us better understand the reasons for such scarcity of texts on blackness and campiness, and to discuss the effectiveness of camp as a political tool.

The call for papers encourages essays that address but are not limited to the following topics:
o Performances of racial passing and excesses of mulatta melodramas;
o Blues and the politics of non-normativity, or “The race problem had at last been solved through Art plus Gladys Bentley,” to misquote Langston;
o Black English and “the will to adorn,” to quote from Zora;
o Superflies and Foxy Browns, or Blaxploitation (and anti-Blaxploitation);
o Black dandies, sweetbacks, and processes of citification;
o Diva gangstas – to paraphrase A. Ross – and swagger queens, or the glamorous campiness of hip-hop culture;
o From Sun Ra to the Electric Lady, or black to the extraterrestrial funkadelic Afrofuture, to signify on Mark Dery;
o Signifyin’ and “camping the dirty dozens,” to borrow from M.B. Ross;
o Symbolic gayness of camp and symbolic whiteness of homosexuality;
o Race perfomativity and race plasticity;
o Gender performativity, Wilde sexuality, and black camp;
o Posthumanism and alleged postraciality.

Only original and unpublished submissions will be considered. Manuscripts should be between 5000-7000 words and should adhere to the latest MLA style. Please, send complete papers to Anna Pochmara, a.pochmara@uw.edu.pl, or Justyna Wierzchowska, j.wierzchowska@uw.edu.pl by May, 31 2017.

 International Conference of the Henry James Society

We come across with periodization problems that Henry James offers when we read the ‘Introduction’ to Modern Korean Literature: An Anthology, 1908-1965 : “A definite demarcation line for the start or end of a literary movement or period is not usually easy to draw. Who today dares put forward the year 1900 as the obvious commencement of twentieth-century English or French literature, or as the very last year of the nineteenth-century literature? Henry James, for example, died in 1916 and wrote most of his major works before 1899 except his last three great novels […] who would classify him without qualm as a nineteenth-century writer or an ‘eminent Victorian’? A cultural phenomenon, an artistic tendency or a literary epoch is never artificially created, nor factitiously terminated.”

We can suggest two implications in the above passage: first, the periodization (1908-1965) given refers to modern Korean literature which covers colonial (1910-1945) and post-colonial periods; secondly, the literary position of Henry James is subtly, and specifically linked to the complex multifaceted period of Korean culture which reveals the difficulty of making a binarist demarcation of tradition and modernity. It seems to be that Jamesian plurality is something to be connected to universal values that apply across cultures, somewhat ironically, due to the conflicting classifications of his works within literary history.

But what defines Jamesian cultural space? Or, what could be the true nature of this universal perspective? This question invites us to think about a dilemma of James’s becoming cosmopolite: “IT is hard to say exactly what is the profit of comparing one race with another, and weighing in opposed groups the manners and customs of neighbouring countries; but it is certain that as we move about the world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is especially the case if we happen to be infected with the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite—that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none.” The “habit of comparing” as cosmopolite exercise generates anxieties, the cosmopolitan moral awareness combined with a keen sense of cultural conditions, arising from the “uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none.”

Our 2017 conference theme “Jamesian Cultural Anxiety in the East and in the West” will focus on different aspects and perspectives of Jamesian ‘cosmopolite’ exercise, to explore how Jamesian cultural anxieties generate essential human issues, and to newly conceive and relocate Henry James studies across the spaces of the East and the West. The conference location Korea, an especially apt site to consider overlapping encounters between Western cultures and other Asian forces of modernity, asks us to consider how contemporary Henry James studies naturally call for global analyses and responses that question our western conceptions of Jamesian cultural anxieties in the process of understanding the evolution of human consciousness.

Those attending the 2017 conference will also be invited to the first performance of The Turn of the Screw in opera-theatre form on the 3rd day (7th July 2017) of the conference. Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

A. Framing Jamesian cultural anxieties – The genesis, transformation, development of cultural anxieties – Cultural anxieties as imaginative consciousness – Anxiety as a sense of location and direction – Anxiety as a means of cultural connection and transformation – Relation(s) as a system of interrelating values – Cultural context as theoretical context – Representations of colonial/post-colonial others – Cosmopolite ethics of cultural anxieties

B. Jamesian cultural identity and the existence of ‘others’ – Self-consciousness and self-estrangement – Biographies and autobiography – Henry James “a native of the James family” – James and women writers – Texts and national contexts – Henry James, a cultural entrepreneur?

C. What defines : – Cultural space – Tradition and modernity – Universal aesthetics or enculturated aesthetics – Cultural imperialism and cultural nationalism – City and society in Henry James – Colonial/post-colonial others – Cosmopolitan habitus – Colonialism, imperialism, anti-colonialism, and orientalism

D. Aesthetics, consciousness and ethics – Working about beauty and identity – The enigmatic and the pragmatic – “Prefaces” as theoretical commitments and frameworks – Art criticism and the art of the novel – Cultural malaise, consciousness and morality – Literary criticism, theatrical criticism, and visual arts criticism – Aesthetic dynamics – Mapping relationships to cultural anxieties as modernist aesthetic

E. Comparison Workshops: affect, appropriation, adaptation, influence – Jamesian cultural act as “cosmopolite exercise” in terms of scope and method – Varieties of social, historical mapping of cultural anxieties in terms of themes and aesthetics: James and American writers, James in/and Asian writers, James and English writers, James and European writers, James and French writers … – Jamesian cultural relativism and universal humanism: how to make cross-cultural, inter-cultural dialogues between the East and the West

Full Panels on the conference program will run for 90 minutes, to accommodate three 20 minute papers and allow sufficient time for questions and discussion afterward. Proposals should include title, 300-word abstract, contact details (full name, professional affiliation, address, and email) and professional biodata (100 words).

Proposals for individual papers and complete panels should be addressed to conference organizer Dr. Choon-Hee Kim by 28 February 2017 at eureka@snu.ac.kr

Conference languages: English, French, Korean

For specific questions regarding type of sessions, submission guidelines, please contact: Dr. Joseph Yosup Kim (henryjames_ks@naver.com).