Thursday 31 March 2011

CFP: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2012

Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2012
The University of Manchester

Gender and Punishment

With keynote speakers Professor Karen Pratt (King’s College London) and Professor Dawn Hadley (University of Sheffield)
11th—13th January 2012

Proposals are now being accepted for 20-minute papers

Punishment is intrinsically related to the way in which authorities (such as the church, monarchy and state) seek to control, enforce and legislate the behaviour of individuals, communities and nations, and accordingly it plays an integral role in regulating bodies, spaces, spirituality and rela-tionships. Representations of punishment - whether threatened, enacted, depicted or performed - are regularly encountered by medievalists working across the disciplines of literature, history, art and archaeology. This conference seeks to explore functions and manifestations of punishment in the Middle Ages and to consider to what extent these are determined by, or aim to determine, gender identity. How is punishment gendered? How does gender intersect with punishment? Topics to consider may include but are not limited to:

  • Punishment in the beginning; the medieval understanding of the Fall.

  • Punishment, pedagogy and gender: the use of punishment in teaching.

  • Christianity, gender and punishment; treatment of the sinful body.

  • Punishment of Jewish, Saracen and heretical men and women.

  • Personal identity and self-inflicted acts of punishment.

  • The (gendered) use of space as punishment.

  • Regal punishments; punishments enacted upon or by medieval rulers.

  • Punishment and the regulation of perceived sexual deviance.

  • Punishment and spectacle; performance of punishment on and off the stage.

  • Gender relations in specific acts of punishment.

  • Confession and penance (as punishment): gendered role of confessor; issues relating to differences between female and male confession and penance.

  • Hell, the diabolic, and representations of gender.

We welcome scholars from a range of disciplines, including history, literature, art history and archaeology. A travel fund is available for postgraduate students who would otherwise be unable to attend.


Please e-mail proposals of no more than 300 words to organiser Daisy Black by 1 September 2011. All queries should also be directed to this address. Please also include biographical information, detailing your name, research area, institution and level of study if applicable.


Further details are available on the conference website.

Tuesday 29 March 2011

Press Release from Anarchy Books

Just got this press release for something cool...

Are you feeling lucky, punk?

ANARCHY BOOKS A fusion of writing, music, game and film ANARCHY BOOKS is a radical new publishing company. Our focus is on multi-strand publishing projects, concepts which combine different media to present a wider experience for the entertainment junkie.

Our first project, SERIAL KILLERS INCORPORATED, is a thriller novel by Andy Remic, author of Spiral, Quake, Warhead, War Machine, Biohell, Hardcore, Cloneworld, Kell's Legend, Soul Stealers and Vampire Warlords, with the music album provided by th3 m1ss1ng (featuring Jon Bodan from Atlanta's Halcyon Way) and short film shot and chopped by Grunge Films. The novel and album release 1st April 2011, with the SERIAL KILLERS INCORPORATED short film June 2011.

Following SKINC comes SF novel SIM by Andy Remic, SF/horror novel MONSTROCITY by Jeffrey Thomas, the anthology VIVISEPULTURE featuring such notable authors as Neal Asher, Lauren Beukes, Eric Brown, Ian Graham, Vincent Holland-Keen, James Lovegrove, George Mann, Gary McMahon, Stan Nicholls, Andy Remic, Jordan Reyne, Ian Sales, Stephen Saville, Wayne Simmons, Jeffrey Thomas, Danie Ware, Ian Watson, Ian Whates, Conrad Williams, and with artwork by Vincent Chong, then horror novel RAIN DOGS by Gary McMahon. Each "project" is a work in progress, and will ship with varying degrees of album, game and film components.

ANARCHY BOOKS is looking to collaborate with musicians, video game creators (any platform) and filmmakers. Please read our SUBMISSION guidelines.

Welcome to our little corner of ANARCHY...

Finally, there's ANARCHY in the UK!

Wednesday 23 March 2011

CFP: 1st Global Conference: Space and Place

Wednesday 14th September – Friday 16th September 2011
Mansfield College,
Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers

Questions of space and place affect the very way in which weexperience and recreate the world. Wars are fought over both real and imagined spaces; boundaries are erected against the “Other”constructed a lived landscape of division and disenfranchisement; and ideology constructs a national identity based upon the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. The construction of space and place is also a fundamental aspect of the creative arts either through the art of reconstruction of a known space or in establishing a relationship between the audience and the performance. Politics, power and knowledge are also fundamental components of space as is the relationship between visibility and invisibility.

This new inter- and multi-disciplinary conference project seeks to explore these and other topics and open up a dialogue about the politics and practices of space and place. We seek submissions from a range of disciplines including archaeology, architecture, urban geography, the visual and creative arts, philosophy and politics and also actively encourage practitioners and non-academics with an interest in the topic to participate. We welcome traditional papers, preformed panels of papers, workshop proposals and other forms of performance – recognising that different disciplines express themselves in different mediums.

Submissions are sought on any aspect of space and place, including the following:

1. Theorising Space and Place
* Philosophies and space and place
*Surveillance, sight and the panoptic structures and spaces of contemporary life
* Rhizomatics and/or postmodernist constructions of space as a “meshwork of paths” (Ingold: 2008)
* The relationship between spatiality and temporality/space as a temporal-spatial event (Massey: 2005)
* The language and semiotics of space and place

2. Situated Identities
* Gendered spaces including the tension between domestic and public spheres
* Work spaces and hierarchies of power
* Geographies and archaeologies of space including Orientalism and Occidentalism
* Ethnic spaces/ethnicity and space
* Disabled spaces/places
* Queer places and spaces

3. Contested spaces
* The politics and ideology of constructions and discourses of spaceand place including the construction of gated communities as aresponse to real/imagined terrorism.
* The relationship between power, knowledge and the construction of place and space
* Territorial wars, both real and imagined.
* The relationship between the global and the local
* Barriers, obstructions and disenfranchisement in the construction of lived spaces
* Space and place from colonisation to globalisation
* Real and imagined maps/cartographies of place
* Transnational and translocal places

4. Representations of place and space
* Embodied/disembodied spaces
* Lived spaces and the architecture of identity
* Haunted spaces/places and non-spaces
* Set design and the construction of space in film, television and theatre
* Authenticity and the reproduction/representation of place in the creative arts
* Technology and developments in the representation of space including new media technologies and 3D technologies of viewing
* Future cities/futurology and space
* Representations of the urban and the city in the media and creative arts * Space in computer games

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 22nd April 2011. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper shouldbe submitted by Friday 22nd July 2011.

300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract

E-mails should be entitled: SP Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might belost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Shona Hill & Shilinka Smith
Conference Leaders
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
New Zealand

Colette Balmain
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
London,
United Kingdom

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Oxfordshire,
United Kingdom.

The conference is part of the ‘Ethos’ series of researchprojects, which in turn belong to the Critical Issues programmes of ID.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be published in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers maybe invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details about the conference, please click here.

For further details about the project please click here.

Wednesday 16 March 2011

CFP: Further Adventures in Wonderland: The Afterlife of Alice

Thursday 1st December 2011

A one-day inter-disciplinary conference in Manchester, UK, exploring the influence, interpretation and representation of Alice in Wonderland in contemporary popular culture. Dress and style, music and film - Alice is out of the rabbit hole and into our collective psyche. This conference seeks to address the perennial popularity of Lewis Carroll's creation, and to explore her most recent incarnations.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers are sought for this one-day conference in Manchester on representations and interpretations of Alice in Wonderland in popular culture. Possible themes may include (but are not limited to):
  • Film, TV and animated adaptations
  • Musical adaptations
  • Music - pop, punk, rock and metal
  • Fashion - from alice bands to stripy tights
  • Psychedelia and drug culture
  • Gothic Alices - subcultures, dress, artwork
  • Disney's Alice
  • Merchandise, ephemera, collectibles

Abstracts of 250-300 words (for a 20 minute paper) should be sent via email to the conference convenors by Thursday 1st September 2011.

Selected papers may be invited for inclusion in an academic collection of essays following the conference.

For more information, please click here.

Thursday 3 March 2011

Book Launch: David Matthews (ed), In Strange Countries

An invitation to the launch of a new collection of essays in memory of J.J. Anderson, a respected medievalist and a wonderful teacher.

In Strange Countries: Middle English Literature and its Afterlife

A Volume of Essays in Memory of J.J. Anderson


John Anderson taught medieval literature at the University of Manchester for nearly 40 years. This book, with contributions from medievalists around the world, pays tribute to his career and its diverse interests, from medieval drama, to Arthurian literature, to the work of the Gawain-poet, whose remarkable poems preoccupied John throughout his career.

Please join us to celebrate John’s career and the publication of In Strange Countries.
Tuesday 8 March 2011, 6pm
The International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Chorlton Mill
3 Cambridge Street
Manchester
M1 5BY
For more information about In Strange Countries, please click here.