CFP: Remembering, Forgetting, Imagining - NY, March 2013

This sounds like an exciting conference, with Marianne Hirsch as keynote speaker. I am currently reading Hirsch's The Generation of Postmemory.

CFP: Remembering, Forgetting, Imagining: The Practices of Memory
1-2 March, 2013
Keynote speaker: Professor Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University
“Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image.”
–Pierre Nora

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the crucial role of memory in formulating our individual and communal identities, and to examine the scholarly discipline of memory itself. We hope to initiate conversations about memory as an active and ongoing cognitive process rather than simply a reaction to past experiences or a set of “facts” frozen in time. While memory purports to preserve the past in the present, it is inherently protean and unstable, and prone to fictionalizing. Indeed, memory and imagination are tightly intertwined; memory and ideology are closely bound; and our memory of what has come before constantly shapes our understanding of and expectations about what is still to come.
This interdisciplinary conference, then, will explore not only this desire to make memory sacred but also our ability to forget, to forget that we've forgotten, and to imagine the past in a way that fits neatly into our worldviews. These questions are particularly relevant in the wake of recent revolutions and social movements in the Arab World, Europe, and even the United States; learning to reinvent the past in a certain way helps us to reimagine the future, and thus inaugurate change. Consequently, we invite proposals that explore the various and variegated practices of memory as figured through literature, culture, politics, and scholarship generally.
We welcome individual abstracts of 250 words or panel proposals of 750 words, for three participants, to practicesofmemory@gmail.com by November 15, 2012. In addition to traditional academic papers, the committee encourages creative literary work, performance art, and multi-media presentations that in some way address the topic.

Presenters might consider, but are not limited to, the following questions:
• How is memory practiced through literature, art, film, or culture?
• Who remembers? What is remembered? What is forgotten? Whose voices are heard? Whose voices are suppressed?
• What is the role of “postmemory,” with its focus on the trauma of the past?
• How is memory understood in early eras, such as medieval or early modern?
• How do texts treat or reflect the past?
• How does the past help us prepare for the future?
• What is the role of imagination in memory or nostalgia?
• How is memory mediated by “memory makers” and memorials?
• In what ways has postmodernism influenced the study of memory?
• What is the role of psychoanalysis in memory studies?
• In what ways does the state repress and/or produce memory?
• How do neoconservatist or neoliberalist movements treat the past?
• How do memorializing objects—texts, photographs, monuments—produce and /or subvert an official state narrative?
• What is the role of affect in producing collective memory?

Now Accepting Proposals for Panel on Baltasar Garzón - St. Louis, November 2011

Many bloggers and other readers end up on this site looking for information on Baltasar Garzón. I am now accepting proposals on Judge Garzón for a Special Session panel at the Midwest MLA (Modern Language Association), to be held in St. Louis in November 2011. For more information on the conference, please click here.

Baltasar Garzón: International Justice on Trial

This panel explores the figure of Judge Baltasar Garzón as a metaphor for post-dictatorial justice in Spain and Latin America. Seen alternately as an advocate for human rights or as a celebrity “activist judge,” many argue Garzón has displaced the cause of the very victims he purports to defend. From his orchestration of the Pinochet arrest to his failed attempt to investigate Francoist-era crimes, Garzón remains at the center of an ideological battle over the narrative reconstruction of the dictatorial past. This panel examines Garzón’s portrayal by self or others in journalism, film or new media, especially with regard to the construction of a transnational memory culture and the practice of citizenship in democratic societies. Papers welcome in English or Spanish.

Please submit 250-word abstracts as email attachments to Kathy Korcheck by June 3, 2011.

Conference: "Backward Glances: History, Imagination and Memory" - Ireland, August 2011

Seen in UPenn CFP:

Backward Glances: 31st August - 1st September
University College, Cork
contact email: backwardglances@ucc.ie

Call For Papers:

Backward Glances: History, Imagination, and Memory
University College Cork, Ireland.
31st August – 1st September 2011

Society is marked by a fascination with its past, yet this need or desire to look backward and understand, is complicated by the illusive nature of the past. Accessible only through the sites of text, memory and imagination, the past is, in essence, unstable and transitory. Both individual and communal in nature, it is continually exposed to processes of re-interpretation, revision, and re-writing. Anchored in the present, the backward glance is influenced by the concerns and needs of that present, and subject to the dominant ideological perspectives of a fleeting contemporary moment.

Backward Glances, a two-day interdisciplinary conference at University College Cork, seeks to generate dialogue and debate about the nature and function of the retrospective gaze. Exploring the diverse modes by which culture strives to assimilate its history, the conference considers the manner in which constructions of the past are conditioned by the lens of the present. The desire to reflect on and reshape former times is not limited to literature. The organisers invite 20-minute papers from a wide variety of fields. Topics may include but are not confined to:

• National history and national memory
• Spaces of Memory
• Historical fiction
• Individual and collective pasts
• Contested histories
• History and trauma
• History and gender
• Memoirs/Biography

Abstracts of approximately 200-250 words to be submitted to backwardglances@ucc.ie by 12th May 2011.

Please direct any queries to this address or see our website www.ucc.ie/backwardglances for more information.

U.K. Conference: "The 9/11 Decade"

The "9/11" Decade: Rethinking Reality: first call for papers, deadline 15 December 2010

Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE), University of Brighton
contact email: nc95@brighton.ac.uk

Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)
University of Brighton, UK

6th Annual International Interdisciplinary Conference
The “9/11” Decade: Rethinking Reality
Wednesday 31 August – Friday 2 September 2011

Joint conference organisers:
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics, University of Brighton;
Centre for Ethics and Value Inquiry, University of Ghent;
Centre for Research Ethics & Ethical Deliberation, Edge Hill University;
Centre for Research in Ethics and Globalisation, University of Groningen

Invited keynote speaker: Geoffrey Robertson QC

Call for Papers

It is no exaggeration to claim that the politics of the last decade have their origin in one event: the hijacking and flying of passenger aircraft into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Since then wars, putatively justified as responses to this attack, have raged in Iraq and in Afghanistan. These wars have resulted in the growth of violent opposition to a perceived US imperial polity; have been used to justify the rewriting of long established legal frameworks protecting the people’s rights have led to neurosis about the protection of borders which the age of global capital was supposed to bring to an end; and have seen the crippling of active leftist opposition to the opportunistic furtherance of the neo-liberal revolution.

This interdisciplinary conference seeks critically to rethink this last decade and to put into question the nostrums it would have us take for granted. We call for papers that:
• challenge dominant paradigms for understanding terror, war, rights, citizenship, legitimacy, politics and the person;
• address the shifts in our cultural landscapes that the securitisation of everyday life has created;
• rethink the architecture of Empire, the literature of “9/11” and the geography of the unending “war on terror.”

Proposals are invited on any relevant topic and should be addressed to an interdisciplinary audience. Likely themes may include be the following, although the conference is by no means limited to these:
The architecture of terror: cities “at war”; designing the security society
“Just” war and asymmetrical warfare: aerial bombing; “suicide” bombing; drones
The politics of 2001-2011: the “war on terror”; rethinking empire, globalisation and sovereignty after “9/11”; the re-articulation of Capital; the “shock doctrine”
Rethinking ourselves: torture; identity; Islamophobia; immigration, asylum and refugees
Culture after “9/11”: art, literature, film and popular culture.
The politics of death after “9/11”: “remembrance” and memorialisation; counting the dead
Philosophy and its limits: the language of terror and the terror of language; sincerity and conviction
Theorising resistance: rethinking the law; rethinking the political

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be emailed to Nicola Clewer by 15 December 2010: nc95@brighton.ac.uk

Decisions will be communicated no later than 15 January 2011.

For further information please visit website here

Conference: "The Role of Memory in the American Construct"

IAAS Postgraduate Symposium - “Re-memory” and “Disremembering”: The Role of Memory in the American Construct

Irish Association for American Studies
contact email: iaas.symposium@gmail.com

IAAS Postgraduate Symposium
Saturday 29th January 2011
Location: Clinton Institute for American Studies, UCD, Dublin, Ireland.

Call for Papers

“Re-memory” and “Disremembering”: The Role of Memory in the American Construct

Memory, (both collective and individual), and memolialisation have an international legacy of shaping identity constructs, impacting upon reactionary politics and re-conceptualising history in accordance with changing social mores. In the United States, choosing what to preserve in collective and individual memory (and perhaps more significantly, what not to preserve and/or commemorate), map a national history of conflict and heroism, despair and hope, decline and renaissance. America’s cultural memory has also been partly shaped by the idea of community. This is reflected in its diverse topography; the collective memory of the small town communities and subjective memory of the frantic, multicultural cities have each, in different ways, impacted on how America has come to define and understand itself. Remembering and choosing not to remember in the United States have, then, been instrumental in surviving trauma and in celebrating achievement, though the suggestion that the past can “infect” the present fosters a tendency to bury the darker aspects of America’s remembrances.

Postgraduate students of all disciplines within the field of American Studies (including literature, film, history, geography, philosophy, visual arts, performance arts, new media, politics, sociology, cultural studies, ecology, law, economics, and international relations) are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute papers in the area of American studies, with possible topics including but not restricted to:

- (Re)-Constructing National Identity
- Conflict resolution
- Problems within (and without) of Cultural Diversity
- Representations of Gender
- Representations of Race
- Historical interpretation and Periodisation
- (Re)-Configuring America’s Collective (Re)Memory
- American Exceptionalism
- The Hyphenated Identity

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be emailed to the IAAS Postgraduate Caucus Co-Chairs:
Louise Walsh (Clinton Institute for American Studies, UCD) and Kate Kirwan (University College Cork) at iaas.symposium@gmail.com
Please note that you must be a member of the IAAS to participate; see membership form attached.

DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF ABSTRACTS: FRIDAY 31st DECEMBER 2010

Seminar: Cosmpolitan Memory and Trauma

CFP: Cosmopolitan Memory and Travelling Trauma (ACLA March 31-April 3, 2011)

Terri Tomsky, University of Alberta; Jennifer Bowering Delisle, McMaster University
contact email:
tomsky@ualberta.ca

When a collective memory of trauma transcends its directly affected community to be taken up by others, it can be said to be “cosmopolitan” (Levy and Sznaider) or “multidirectional” (Rothberg). The concept of a travelling or a genuinely “cosmopolitan” memory is compelling. Indeed, how a memory of trauma travels across cultures, and develops in time as a shared or borrowed memory is a topic that necessitates further discussion. Like Edward Said’s notion of “travelling theory,” the transition of a memory from a specific context into a new setting or across a transnational space has significant theoretical and pragmatic consequences. Questions must be asked about how traumatic experiences, especially of political violence, are mediated across space and time; how might a transported memory of trauma sharpen consciousness and shape cross-cultural communities? Equally, how might it enable selective commemoration, and risk reification or domestication?

This seminar invites scholars across the fields of trauma, postcolonial, and memory studies to critically examine the movement of traumatic memories across cultures. We are interested in proposals that address the productive transcultural circulation of trauma – what Michael Rothberg has called “multidirectional memory” – as a politically significant source for oppressed communities. Additionally, we seek proposals that engage the travel of traumatic memory in relation to audience, affect, capital, and cultural and economic imperialisms.

The deadline for 250 word paper proposals is NOVEMBER 1, 2010. Proposals should be submitted through the ACLA website: http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php?override=xyzzy

Memory Conference: "The Art of Public Memory"

CALL FOR PAPERS, WORKSHOPS, PERFORMANCES, LECTURE PERFORMANCES

THE ART OF PUBLIC MEMORY

An international, interdisciplinary conference exploring intersections of the arts, memory, and history

April 7th to 10th, 2011, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

The conference is, in part, inspired by the performance of Bill T. Jones's Serenade/ The Proposition, at UNCG on Friday, April 8. A contemporary dance about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and a rumination on the nature of history, Jones’s dance suggests examination of other works involving Lincoln such as the current off Broadway play Abraham Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party Review and Suzan-Lori Park's 1994 The America Play, and portraits of Lincoln by composers such as Charles Ives and Roy Harris. It also calls for a broader examination of the arts, memory and history. Potential questions include: How and in what ways do memories acquire a public character and through what means are they preserved, archived, and negotiated in everyday life? In what ways do expressions of public memory create, sustain, and de-stabilize the work(ings) of power? How are ideas of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation re-inscribed or contested through performances, especially performances of history? In what ways do the body, bodily action, and bodily experience enter into public memory?

We invite proposals of academic papers, panels, workshops, lecture performances, and performances from scholars and artists in the arts, education, the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The conference is sponsored by, and celebrates, the new School of Music, Theatre and Dance at UNCG, and is co-sponsored by UNCG's Program in Women's and Gender Studies.

Proposals must be received by December 1, 2010
Notification of acceptance by January 31, 2011

Send your submission through email to: womens_studies@uncg.edu.

Please include your last name and ART OF PUBLIC MEMORY in the Subject Heading of the e-mail. The text should be attached and pasted in the body of the e-mail to assure access. Please send documents in .doc or .docx formats.

Receipt of all submissions will be confirmed electronically.

REQUIREMENTS

Individual papers should not exceed 20 minutes for presentation. Submit a 500 word abstract.

Panels consisting of three individual presenters may be proposed. Submit a 250 word discussion of the ideas and issues important to the panel in addition to individual paper proposals of 500 words each for the presenters. Please send all documents together.

Performances (solo performance, staged readings, dance, music, installations): We hope to include a limited number of performances, especially performances that can be accomplished in alternate spaces, studios, classrooms, or in shared evenings of music, theatre, and dance. Submit a 500 word abstract describing the event and its organization.

Lecture-Demonstrations, Lecture-Performances, or Workshops may run from 30-45 minutes. Submit a 500 word abstract describing the topic and organization of the session.

For all proposals, include:

• name
• affiliation (if applicable),
• contact information,
• 150 word biography of presenter,
• presentation title,
• presentation format (individual paper, panel, workshop, performance, etc),
• space needs,
• technology needs.

Queries about proposals may be addressed by e-mail to Ann Dils at ahdils@uncg.edu.

Conference on Fiction and Trauma

From: UPenn CFP

Collection CFP: Attached to Fiction: Trauma, Loss, Pleasure (4 October, 2010)

full name / name of organization:
Dr Hila Shachar and Dr Sophie Sunderland/English and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia

contact email:
attachedtofiction@gmail.com

Collection Call for Papers:

Attached to Fiction: Trauma, Loss, Pleasure

Editors: Dr Hila Shachar and Dr Sophie Sunderland, English and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia

Contact email: attachedtofiction@gmail.com

"Mr Sakamoto said that reading had saved his life. Not mathematics. Not money. Not travel. Reading. At a time, he said, when he felt blasted by images, words had anchored him, secured him, stopped his free-falling plunge into nowhere."

-Gail Jones, Dreams of Speaking (London: Harvill Secker, 2006), p. 132.

A survivor of the atomic bomb, Gail Jones’s Mr Sakamoto expresses the inherent relationship between literature, loss and trauma. Words that fail to mediate or reconcile loss can also form fictional worlds that offer a particular kind of fidelity to the troubling, incomprehensible event of loss. Attachments to fiction can therefore be intensely felt and strongly defended as part of traumatic experience. We are seeking 300-500 word abstracts for a book collection of essays and short stories on how fictional narratives intersect with personal narratives of loss and trauma. This collection also aims to explore the complex forms of pleasure brought about by the attachment to, or creation of, fiction during traumatic events, loss, or grief. Essays and fiction with an Australian focus are particularly welcome. Specific examples of topics might include, but are not limited to:

Family histories of loss and trauma told in fictional form

Identification with a specific novel or character at a particularly traumatic stage in life

The use of reading and writing as a therapeutic and cathartic experience

The “pleasure” of fiction during periods of loss and trauma

Writing through grief

Reflections upon why certain novels or narratives are particularly important during certain traumatic events

Fictional short stories that engage with the themes of literary production, trauma and loss

Personal narratives of coping with trauma and loss through the process of reading and writing

Theoretical perspectives on literary representations of trauma and loss

Attachment as a psychological and psychoanalytic model with which to consider personal relationships to fictional characters and narratives

Untold and forgotten stories of local Australian and Western Australian traumatic histories

Parallels between literary fiction and life experiences

The traumatic experience of writing itself

In the spirit of the collection, we welcome both fictional and non-fictional short stories and personal essays that engage with the primary themes of the collection. Essays and short stories can be approached from any tone, from the humorous and irreverent, to the serious and contemplative. While scholarly approaches are also welcome, these essays and short stories should be in the style of creative fiction and non-fiction.

Currently, Australian author Gail Jones (University of Western Sydney) is attached to this project as a possible contributor. We welcome abstracts from scholars, creative writers, emerging and established authors, and others. Please send abstracts and a short bio by 4th of October, 2010, to Hila Shachar and Sophie Sunderland at attachedtofiction@gmail.com. Complete essays and short stories of approximately 3000-5000 words will be due on 31st of January, 2011. Inquiries are welcome.

* By web submission at 06/03/2010 - 10:03

Conference: Forms and Functions of Social Memories

From UPENN CFP:

Call for Papers (see website here):

Forms and Functions of Social Memories -- Perspectives from Social and Cultural Sciences
The conference "Forms and Functions of Social Memories -- Perspectives from Social and Cultural Sciences" takes place at the Institute for Sociology of the University of Erlangen. It starts at December 10th and ends December 12th around noon. It is planned as a mixture between plenary and panel sessions.

Please send a 500 words proposal for a 30 min. paper by September 30th, 2010 to: info@soziale-erinnerung.de.

The conference aims at collecting and re-considering the manifold empirical research on social memories on behalf of their theoretical potential. It is an astonishing fact, that despite of a lot of research in social and cultural sciences on social memories there are rather few comprehensive theoretical considerations. Therefore, we want to set the focus on the integration of different theoretical approaches and empirical research.

In the self-definition of modernity multiple social memories take the place of the "Great Narrative" on different levels that don't have to be compatible. A theory of social memories faces the problem of integrating social dynamics, cultural pluralisation and processes of social differentiation without ignoring contexts of interactions like families or milieus. However, the circulating terms and definitions of forms of social memories should not just be placed side by side. Instead we want to focus, empirically and theoretically, on the processes of formation and constitution that underlie these conceptualizations to work out both lines of conflict and potentials of integration.

The conference would like to discuss theoretical concepts and empirical studies concerning social memories in an interdisciplinary framework. Based on these discussions we would like to ask for theoretical enhancements. From performative acts to narrative situations of interaction or discourse, constructions and representations of the past should be observed in conjunction with problems like oblivion, authenticity, factuality and validity or breaches in the transmission of the past. On the one hand the future directedness of social memories in form of again and again constituted horizons of expectations should be clarified. On the other hand it is deemed to analyse social memories in their function as mechanisms of "Transmission" regarding the specific selectivities that evolve at the intersections (of persons, groups, generations, discourses, etc.) and that constitute the specific relationship between remembrance and oblivion. According to this, the definition of the particular functionality of memories for the processes of social and individual formation of meaning is important, on both counts biographically and systemically.

Of equal importance is the reflection of institutionalised remembrance and of the own position of a speaker: Scientists are directly or indirectly involved in the practice of (institutionalised) remembrance and therefore are facing the challenge of concerning themselves with its contexts, conditions, (political) purpose and the implicit ideologies.

We have invited the following speakers: Paul Connerton (Oxford/UK), Elena Esposito (Modena/Reggio Emilia/ Italy), Mary Fulbrook (London/UK), Jeffrey K. Olick (Virginia/USA), Gabriele Rosenthal (Goettingen/Germany), Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (Warsaw/Poland), Christian Gudehus (Essen/Germany)

Topics include:

* Individual -- Interaction -- Society: boundaries and transitions between the different forms of memories
* Metaphors, terms and forms of social memories and their conditions of formation
* Influence of social differentiation on social remembrance (generations, classes, cultural pluralisation, gender, etc.)
* Transformation of social memories (interdependency of social transformations, processes and social memories)
* Facticity, authenticity and the realm of experience
* Media, discourse and their functions for remembrance
* Re-presentations of the past (body memory, rituals, sites of remembrance, etc.)
* Social and individual practices of remembrance
* Transgenerational transmission and breaches of tradition
* Remembrance and oblivion between institution, power and ideology

The conference languages will be English and German. The presentations are intended to be published in a special volume of a sociological journal after the conference.

Deutsch

Conference in Ireland: "Women's Memory-Work" -- Marjorie Agosín, Others to Speak

From: U of Penn CFP

“Women's Memory-Work:Gendered Dilemmas of Social Transformation” 24-26 August 2010 University of Limerick, IRELAND

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE “Women's Memory-Work: Gendered Dilemmas of Social Transformation” 24-26 August 2010 University of Limerick, IRELAND

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
• MARJORIE AGOSÍN, Professor of Spanish, Wellesley College, USA
• PUMLA GOBODO-MADIKIZELA, Professor of Psychology, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• MARY L. KELLER, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Wyoming, USA
• MARY NASH, Professor of Contemporary History,University of Barcelona, Spain

The 3-day international conference Women's Memory-Work: Gendered Dilemmas of Social Transformation seeks to explore women-centered expressions of historical experience as fertile ground for cultural agency and social transformation in national and transnational socioeconomic and political arenas. Inspired by the United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1820, which call for a gender-sensitive implementation of national stability in peacekeeping operations, this conference invites the participation of scholars, activists and artists whose work addresses women’s engagement with the public memory of nations emerging from conflict and belonging to the class of “transitioning democracies.” At the same time, the conference intends to generate a larger dialogue that includes insights associated with women’s production of and participation in public and commemoration rituals in polities that are beyond the “transitioning” phase of democratic development, but which remain entangled in dilemmas of uneven historical and political representation and economic/territorial disparities.

The central questions the conference will be exploring are:

• What are the politics and ethics of producing and reproducing gendered memory-work? Who can participate? Who is excluded? What are the critical variables of potential alliances? Where do obstacles/limitations lie?
• In what ways might we be able to re-read traditional performances of womanhood, associated with upholding conservative social values of kinship and nationhood (among others), so as to reassess their potential participation in a radical politics/ethics of remembering, but also of envisioning future paradigms and material practices?
• How do women’s memories of traumatic repression and/or dogged dissidence participate in the historical imaginary and political vision of cultural identities and transitioning democracies?
• What are the challenges we face in building bridges across local gendered activism and international discourses of human rights and law? And how may we insist on the importance of gendered memory-work without re-inscribing the conceptual boundaries we seek to undermine?

This project is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Irish Government. As a transnational and multidisciplinary project, the conference aims to cover a wide range of disciplines—anthropology, geography, political philosophy, law, history, religion, sociology, psychology, literature, fine arts and cultural studies at large. We welcome proposals for papers in topics that include, but are not limited to:

• Gendered memory and political/cultural subjectivity
• Female consciousness and larger social subalternities (racial, ethnic, sexual, etc)
• Women’s cultural/political participation in peace processes
• Gendered politics/ethics of witnessing and testimony (“traumatic” or otherwise)
• Women’s rights and human rights
• Women’s self-referential narratives (autobiography, memoir) and memory performance
• Women’s agency beyond alterity
• Gendered labor and ecocriticism
• Women and the “war-story” (official or sectarian)
• Gendered models of reconciliation/forgiveness/healing
• Gendered dilemmas of redressing the past, seeking justice/peace
• Gender as/and strategic essentialism(s)

Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 20-minute presentation by April 16, 2010 to womensmemory@ul.ie.
All proposals will receive acknowledgement of receipt within a week from the closing date, and a final reply as to the acceptance of the proposal by May 7, 2010. If an abstract is accepted for the conference we request that a full draft paper is made available to the conference committee by July 31, 2010. A selection of papers from the conference will be published.
We also welcome thematic panel proposals (maximum 4 speakers).

Please submit the abstract or panel proposal with abstracts in Word or RTF formats along with the following information:
1. Name of author(s)
2. Affiliation
3. Position
4. Contact information
5. 1-page CV
If you have questions about the conference or about submitting a proposal please direct them to Emma Leahy— emma.leahy@ul.ie

Joint organizing chairs:
Cinta Ramblado—Lecturer in Spanish, University of Limerick
Yianna Liatsos—Lecturer in English, University of Limerick

To Download Call For Papers please visit http://www.ul.ie/isks/news.html

Interdisciplinary Colloquium on War and Memorialization

From: CFP, U Penn

Interdisciplinary Colloquium: Conflict, Memory and Memorialisation: War and European Culture in the Twentieth Century, 17-19 Jul

full name / name of organization:
Archbishop Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK

contact email:
phillim@hope.ac.uk

cfp categories:
cultural_studies_and_historical_approaches
ethnicity_and_national_identity
twentieth_century_and_beyond

contributions to an international colloquium dedicated to examining questions of conflict and memory, focusing on the legacies within Europe of the two global conflicts of the twentieth century and their mythologisation through processes of memorialisation. The principal aim is to explore how music, literature and other arts have mediated the experience of war and shaped historical consciousness in these contexts: this will inform analysis of the way individual and collective memories have changed and developed over time, and their significance for the ongoing formation and articulation of identities in European societies and cultures.

The keynote speaker will be Professor Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale
Other confirmed participants include:

Tim Cole (University of Bristol, UK)
Rachel Cowgill (Liverpool Hope University, UK)
Nalini Ghuman (Mills College, US)
Elaine Kelly (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Terry Phillips (Liverpool Hope University, UK)
Christopher Scheer (Utah State University, US)
David Taylor (University of Huddersfield, UK)
Guy Tourlamain (Liverpool Hope University, UK)
Laura Watson (National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Eire)

Abstracts of 200 words should be sent by email to Dr Terry Phillips (phillim@hope.ac.uk) by 28 February 2010. Places are limited, and will be allocated to enhance disciplinary, geographical, and chronological coverage. The colloquium website will be available shortly, but travel and location information can be found at http://www.hope.ac.uk/gettingtohope

* By web submission at 02/14/2010 - 17:16

Call for Papers for Summer Conference

Lucas Manuel Bietti, who runs the fascinating research blog Collective Memory Project has posted the following information that readers of this blog may also find useful:

Death, Commemoration and Memory: an Exploration of Representation, Concept and Change Call for Papers: Death, Commemoration and Memory: an Exploration of Representation, Concept and Change

Thursday 24 and Friday 25 June 2010

The Death, Commemoration and Memory (DCM) Research Group is based within the School of Arts, Culture and Environment at the University of Edinburgh. Founded in 2008, DCM provides a forum for postgraduates and staff whose research engages with any aspect of the Group’s remit, attracting junior and senior scholars from a variety of academic disciplines. Building upon the Group’s success, a two‐day conference is planned in Edinburgh for June 2010 to provide a platform for further interdisciplinary discussion and to create new networks between researchers across the world.

Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:

- Acts of commemoration, mourning practices and rituals

- The social aspects of individual memory, collective memories and cultural attitudes towards memory

- The ethics and etiquette of death studies: the treatment of human remains in archaeology, pathology and museum practice

- Death in the visual arts: commemoration through architectural and artistic practices

- Poetic, literary and musical interpretations of death

- The dichotomy between history and memory

- Psychological and sociological studies of bereavement

We welcome abstracts of 300 words on any aspect of the conference’s themes, accompanied by a short academic resume of 200 words maximum. Applications should be sent to dcm.ed@hotmail.co.uk with ‘DCM CONFERENCE’ as the email’s subject. Submission deadline: 12 March 2010.

Contained Memory Conference (New Zealand)

This just in. . .

Contained Memory Conference 2010

The conference seeks to bring together multidisciplinary perspectives in a discourse on contained memory. While memory is understood to be integral to the constitution of the self, it works in concert with external repositories of memory ranging from personal mnemonic objects to collective, social, and public memory residing in community traditions, artifacts in museums, and archives, including electronic and other recording systems. Memory is embodied in intergenerational rituals and practices and intangible forms of storytelling, song, and performance, as well as in natural elements and the physical memory forms of monuments and memorials.

Although there are distinct ways of thinking about or containing memory, the edges of containment are porous, enabling encounters between different expressions of memory. By encompassing a wide variety of ways of conceiving memory through different cultural and theoretical orientations and disciplinary backgrounds, it is hoped this conference can build a nexus of contained memories. Papers may originate from a variety of knowledge sources including (but not limited to): anthropology, archeology, art history/criticism, communication studies, cultural studies, customary knowledge, ethnography, film/video studies, fine/visual art, history, geography, landscape architecture, literary theory, material culture studies, memory studies, museum studies, musicology, neuroscience, neuropsychology, performance/theatre, philosophy, photography, psychoanalysis, psychology, rhetorical studies, sociology, and visual culture studies.

Possible Contained Memory sessions:
The Land / Earth / Landscape

— The expression of memory in personified land and landscape features; cultural erasure and renaissance
— Diaspora: the threat of memory loss following migration and the preservation of intergenerational memory expressed physically through photographs, diaries, and artifacts, and the intangible or ephemeral qualities of dance, theatre, and songs from “home”
— Sites of trauma
— Genealogy / whakapapa
Containing public memory

—Museums, records, archives, memorials, oral histories and mnemonic devices
—Transmission, preservation, mutability of memory
Rituals of memory

— Enacting / performing of memory “acts”
— Mimetic performance
— Narratives, mythology / folklore, and cosmologies
Site / Space / Time

— Bodily memory expressed through performance and ritual
— Interaction between the present and the past
Memory and the senses

— Phenomenology of the senses
— Music / sound
Autobiography

— Externalization of personal memory in art forms
The human mind

— The nature of memory and the definition of self; cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology
— Psychoanalysis; forgetting as a means of suppressing trauma or facilitating cultural destruction, annihilation, or oblivion
— Trauma, dementia, the mutability and fragility of memory
— The mind and digital memory

Because of the geographic location of the conference it is envisaged that some papers will respond to contained memory in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.

Conference Venue:
Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa, Tongarewa
55 Cable Street
Wellington 6011, New Zealand
+64 4 381 7000
www.tepapa.govt.nz

Abstracts due: 30 April 2010

Conference Call for Papers - Trauma and Testimony

From: cfp.english.upenn.edu

UPDATE] NEXUS 2010--Trauma and Testimony
full name / name of organization:
NEXUS
contact email:
dmcgloth@utk.edu

NEXUS—An Interdisciplinary Conference
Trauma and Testimony
University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Thursday, March 18-Saturday, March 20, 2010
Web Address: http://web.utk.edu/~nexus

Plenary Speakers: Cathy Caruth (Emory Univeristy) and Julia Levine

This conference seeks to explore the relationship between trauma and testimony, and in particular the therapeutic possibilities and potential problems that testimony entails. Testimony is the term used in trauma studies to talk about the process of articulating or expressing one’s trauma for an “Other” as a crucial step in recovering from the trauma. Dori Laub argues that trauma destroys the possibility of both the internal and the external “Other” and so the traumatized individuals exist in a space of both knowing and not knowing their trauma.

As an interdisciplinary conference, we welcome submissions from relevant fields and disciplines. Abstracts (250-300 words) are invited on a broad range of topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Representations of shared traumatic events (the Holocaust, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc.)
•Ethical issues of truth versus “creative license” in representation
•The role of both the speaker and the listener
•The limits of representation
•Whose history is it, anyway? First-person testimony vs. bearing witness from the “outside”
•Testimony and Therapy—the therapeutic value of telling one’s story
•Testimony and Justice—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission experiment
•Bearing witness using contemporary media (the Shoah Foundation, blogs, etc.)
•Testimony and Action—Telling as a Catalyst for Change
•Collective Suffering and Collective Guilt—the historical and ethical limits of trauma and testimony
•Interdisciplinary Studies—Trauma as experienced through the prisms of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other categories of identification
•Trauma and the Law—Issues of victims’ rights
•Papers written on literary and/or artistic representations of trauma
•Creative submissions
•The future of trauma studies

Individual papers or panel proposals will be considered.

As this is an interdisciplinary conference, please feel free to submit proposals which speak to your academic interests, even if they do not fit neatly into the categories listed above.

Please submit abstracts to Dennis McGlothin (dmcgloth@utk.edu) or Teresa Lopez (tlopez@utk.edu) by January 15, 2009.