Lives & Letters Mailing: April 2017

Lives & Letters Mailing: April 2017

 

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing contains information about:

  1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
  2. Call for papers! Multiplicities of writing and archival research, 16 June 2017, University of Cambridge
  3. Life Writing – Call for Abstracts: Philosophy and Life Writing
  4. Life History and Life Writing Research: Critical and Creative Approaches (24/4/2017; 6/16/2017) Sussex, UK
  5. [MASSOBS] Extended Deadline 24th April: Call For Papers. Life History and Life Writing Research: Critical and Creative Approaches. Brighton and Sussex PG Conference. 16th June 2017
  6. Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian Auto/Biography–Life Writing 14:2 June 2017 now available
  7. Women and Archives (3/15/2018) Special Issue, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature
  8. CNR Symposium on Political Narratives and the Study of Lives (5/19/2017) London, UK

 

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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News

We at Whites Writing Whiteness have been working closely with HRI toward finalising and publishing the project datasets worked on, and we are very pleased to announce that the publication of the new HRI-hosted website is now in sight! For more particulars of this, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/publication-ahoy-to-starboard/

But that’s not all! In recent weeks there have been a number of new features added to the Whites Writing Whiteness website. For instance, we have just launched a new set of webpages providing detailed information about all the collections worked on as well as all the archives visited, which can be found here: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/collections/

 

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2. Call for papers! Multiplicities of writing and archival research, 16 June 2017, University of Cambridge

Multiplicities of writing and archival research

Friday 16 June 2017 @ University of Cambridge

A Call for Papers! And Registration!

A one-day conference will be held at the University of Cambridge on Friday 16 June 2017 to explore multiplicities of writing as a set of representational social practices involved in archival research. This call for is for papers that concern ‘writing’ in the broadest sense in relation to all forms of archival research, with ‘the archive’ cast wide to spread from National Archives, to local archives, to button-boxes and photograph albums, to radical-archives-in-the-making, to digital collections and more.

The conference is one of three organised around the clarion-call made in The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences (Moore, Salter, Stanley & Tamboukou, Routledge, August 2016) that the ‘archival turn’ needs to be rethought in ways that avoid re-mythologising and which instead put ‘the trace’ (conference 1, Edinburgh), the power of the metaphorical (conference 2, London) and the multiplicities of writing (conference 3, Cambridge) at the core. Please see our website for further information about the series of events: https://sites.google.com/site/thebookarchiveproject/conferences-and-research-events

Cambridge theme: Writing and inscription more widely are linked ways of representing the world and events and as such are central to archival research. Writing/inscription is the social practice through which the documentary and other traces that are the focus of archival research are produced. It is also the social practice through which archival researchers note-take about their reading of the secondary scholarly literature as well as of the primary traces in archives and collections that are foundational, and then later assemble an interpretational account of the meaning they ascribe to the traces they have worked on.

Writing in the senses invoked here is at the core of the representational problematic with which all archival research needs to grapple. That is, writing/inscription is foundational, as the ruins of the past that survive; but it is also often not ‘the thing itself’, but a second order representation of this produced by a person or group of people with a particular viewpoint on what this is, why it happened and what it means.

The many depictions and transformations of ‘the trace’, the collection and the archive that writing produces, produced both by ‘them’, the originators of the traces worked with, and by ‘us’, researchers of formal and informal kinds, is the focus of the Cambridge symposium. 

Offers of papers: Offers of short papers on any aspect of writing and inscription in conducting archival research are welcomed. The aim is to represent a wide range of ideas, arguments, archives and traces. To foster discussion, future collaboration and networking. Please complete the Registration Form below and send a title and an abstract of not more than 400 words with your offer of a paper as an email attachment to Andrea Salter, Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Cambridge, email:acs87@cam.ac.uk. Many thanks.

Closing date for offers: The closing date for offers of papers is Friday 21 April 2017.

Registration for attendance: Registration for the Cambridge event is now open. There event is free to attend, however room capacity is limited and therefore early registration is encouraged. There is a registration form at the end of this flyer – please complete and send the form to the email address above. Exactly when registration closes will depend on numbers, but the final date will be 9 June 2017. Numbers will be limited to a maximum of 30, so please register asap to avoid disappointment. Many thanks.

The date:                           Friday 16 June, 10am to 4.30pm (registration and coffee from 9:30 am)

The place:                         University of Cambridge (central Cambridge location)

Offers of paper:               at the latest by Friday 21 April 2017

The detail:                       Building & room details with abstracts & a conference programme will be sent by email and file attachment at the end of May 2017 to people who are registered for the event.

Further information about The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences(Moore, Salter, Stanley & Tamboukou, Routledge, August 2016) is available at: https://www.routledge.com/The-Archive-Project-Archival-Research-in-the-Social-Sciences/Moore-Salter-Stanley-Tamboukou/p/book/9781472453945

REGISTRATION FORM – Multiplicities of writing and archival research, University of Cambridge, 16 June 2017

Conference information about buildings, papers, abstracts etc. will be sent only to people who have pre-registered to attend. This is because numbers have to be known in advance for health and safety reasons as rooms have limited capacity.

NAME:

INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATION:

EMAIL ADDRESS:

BRIEF OUTLINE OF INTEREST/EXPERIENCE IN ARCHIVAL RESEARCH: (for circulation with abstracts and further information):

ARE YOU OFFERING A PAPER? If so, please remember to send your title and an abstract of no more than 400 words by Friday 21 April 2017!

 

Please return to Andrea Salter at acs87@cam.ac.uk asap to register by 9 June 2017 at the latest. Thank you!

 

——

Dr Andrea Salter
School Research Facilitator for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Schools of Arts and Humanities and the Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Cambridge
17 Mill Lane
Cambridge CB2 1RX
Tel.: +44(0)1223 764079
http://www.ahssresearch.group.cam.ac.uk

 

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 3. Life Writing – Call for Abstracts: Philosophy and Life Writing

Deadline: 1 May 2017

Philosophers have long been interested in the nature of the self and in the meaning and narrative structure of human lives. Many philosophers have themselves written autobiographies. Descartes’s Discourse on the Method, Augustine’s Confessions and Rousseau’s Confessions are all frequently cited as early influences on the writing of autobiography. Yet there has been very little direct, theoretical and systematic interest from philosophers in the modern boom in autobiographical writing.

Christopher Cowley recently addressed this gap in his book The Philosophy of Autobiography (University of Chicago Press, 2015). In this special themed edition of Life Writing, he plans to open up further discussion, together with his co-editor, D. L. LeMahieu, an intellectual historian and the author of two books and many articles on British cultural history.

Topics:

Classic philosophic life writing (Augustine, Rousseau, Mill, Sartre etc).
How philosophers fashion their life narratives compared to other disciplines.
The relationship between subjectivities, truth and philosophic abstractions.
The influences of class, gender, race and nation; and the intersections of temporality and life narrative.
The role of faith in one’s self-understanding (perhaps with a reference to Kierkegaard).
The limits of narrative in the auto/biographical genre (perhaps with reference to Ricoeur).
The problem of understanding people in different times and places: historical biographies.
Can there be a complete secular biography of a devout religious believer?
To what degree should the biographer judge the subject?
The balance between luck and self-determination in the biography.
How the meaning of a person’s life changes over time: different biographies of the same person.
The relative advantages of writing a biography about a living person and a dead person.
The place of vanity and humility in autobiography.
Internalised oppressive self-conceptions and autobiography.
The right of response from those written about in others’ memoirs/autobiographies.
Do dying autobiographers have nothing to lose, and are they therefore most authentic?
Autobiography as revenge and punishment.

Abstracts are invited addressing any of the topics above. Please identify within your submission which of these topics you have chosen to address, and suggest four or five relevant keywords.

Abstracts should be between 500 and 750 words and include the author’s institutional affiliation, if any.

Due date for abstracts: 1 May 2017. 

Abstracts should be emailed as a Word document to the journal’s editor at maureenperkins@iinet.net.au

Final due date for completed papers if abstract is accepted: 1 January 2018.

Papers will be submitted for blind peer review and final online publication during 2018, with print publication to follow.

Editorial information
Guest Editor: Christopher Cowley
Guest Editor: D. L. LeMahieu

*       *       * 

IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home

 

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 4. Life History and Life Writing Research: Critical and Creative Approaches (24/4/2017; 6/16/2017) Sussex, UK 

Call For Papers. Deadline 24th April 2017. Please circulate.

Life History and Life Writing Research: Critical and Creative Approaches

The 9th annual Brighton-Sussex postgraduate conference is co-organised by the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research (CLHLWR, University of Sussex) and the Centre for Research in Memory, Narrative and Histories (CRMNH, University of Brighton).

Hosted at the University of Sussex, 16th June, 2017. 10.00-4.00.

Keynote Speakers:

Clare Best and Professor Lyn Thomas. Life-writing, photography and the resilient body: Clare Best’s Self-portrait without Breasts and Annie Ernaux’s L’Usage de la Photo. 

Clare Best is the author of Treasure Ground (Happenstance 2009), Excisions, Waterloo Press, 2011), Breastless (Pighog, 2011), Cell (Frogmore Press, 2015), Springlines (Little Toller, 2017).

Professor Lyn Thomas, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex and author of Clothes Pegs: A Woman’s Life in 30 Outfits http://www.clothespegs.net/

Dr Deborah Madden. Victorian Cultures of Life Writing: Perspectives on Gender, Temporality and Empire.

Deborah Madden is a Lecturer in Social History, University of Brighton. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has published on Richard Brothers and John Wesley alongside collaborative research that examines social and intellectual histories across a number of projects.

Call for Papers:

Life history and life writing have opened the door to creativity in universities across disciplines – politically, poetically, philosophically, playfully.

Questioning impersonal and dislocated theory by radical scholars of gender, sexuality, race and class has created a space for academics in the Humanities to bring their own histories into their work, or even become life writers. Simultaneously creative life writers are increasingly speaking to academic concerns with representation and the self. This conference aims to reflect and respond to this convergence. We particularly welcome papers addressing the following areas:

  • creative and critical approaches to research on life histories and life writing
  • writing the lives of others creatively
  • the practice of ‘speaking personally, academically’
  • life writing as project; innovations in approaches to life writing
  • the impact of academic research and approaches on life writing and life writers
  • practice-based or multimedia approaches to lives
  • workshops or teaching exercises that use creative life history/writing

Postgraduate and early career researchers are warmly invited to present at this conference. This is a free event, refreshments and organic vegetarian lunch isprovided by CRMNH and CLHLWR.

Please send a 300-word abstract, a brief biography (including your name, degree, year and research interests), five keywords, and your contact details by 24th April 2017 to: Dr Sam Carroll at Memorynarrativehistories@brighton.ac.uk

http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/centre-for-research-in-memory-narrative-and-histories/centre-events/postgraduate-conferences/life-history-and-life-writing-research-critical-and-creative-approaches

 

*       *       *

IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home

 

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 5. [MASSOBS] Extended Deadline 24th April: Call For Papers. Life History and Life Writing Research: Critical and Creative Approaches. Brighton and Sussex PG Conference. 16th June 2017.

Life History and Life Writing Research: Critical and Creative Approaches

The 9th annual Brighton-Sussex postgraduate conference is co-organised by the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research (CLHLWR, University of Sussex) and the Centre for Research in Memory, Narrative and Histories (CRMNH, University of Brighton).
Hosted at the University of Sussex, 16th June, 2017. 10.00-4.00.

Keynote Speakers:

Clare Best and Professor Lyn Thomas. Life-writing, photography and the resilient body: Clare Best’s Self-portrait without Breasts and Annie Ernaux’s L’Usage de la Photo.

Clare Best is the author of Treasure Ground (Happenstance 2009), Excisions, Waterloo Press, 2011), Breastless (Pighog, 2011), Cell (Frogmore Press, 2015), Springlines (Little Toller, 2017).

Professor Lyn Thomas, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex and author of Clothes Pegs: A Woman’s Life in 30 Outfits http://www.clothespegs.net/

 

Dr Deborah Madden. Victorian Cultures of Life Writing: Perspectives on Gender, Temporality and Empire.

Deborah Madden is a Lecturer in Social History, University of Brighton. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has published on Richard Brothers and John Wesley alongside collaborative research that examines social and intellectual histories across a number of projects.

Call for Papers:

Life history and life writing have opened the door to creativity in universities across disciplines – politically, poetically, philosophically, playfully.

Questioning impersonal and dislocated theory by radical scholars of gender, sexuality, race and class has created a space for academics in the Humanities to bring their own histories into their work, or even become life writers. Simultaneously creative life writers are increasingly speaking to academic concerns with representation and the self. This conference aims to reflect and respond to this convergence. We particularly welcome papers addressing the following areas:

  • creative and critical approaches to research on life histories and life writing
  • writing the lives of others creatively
  • the practice of ‘speaking personally, academically’
  • life writing as project; innovations in approaches to life writing
  • the impact of academic research and approaches on life writing and life writers
  • practice-based or multimedia approaches to lives
  • workshops or teaching exercises that use creative life history/writing

Postgraduate and early career researchers are warmly invited to present at this conference. This is a free event, refreshments and lunch provided by CRMNH and CLHLWR.

Please send a 300-word abstract, a brief biography (including your name, degree, year and research interests), five keywords, and your contact details by 24th April 2017 to: Dr Sam Carroll at Memorynarrativehistories@brighton.ac.uk

 

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6. Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian Auto/Biography–Life Writing 14:2 June 2017 now available

 

Life Writing, Volume 14, Issue 2, June 2017 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online.

Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian Auto/Biography

This new issue contains the following articles:

 

Editorial 

Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian Auto/biography
Felicity James & Julian North
Pages: 133-138 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291063
Articles 

Coherence and Inclusion in the Life Writing of Romantic-period London
Matthew Sangster
Pages: 141-153 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291246

Intertextual Sociability in Victorian Lives of the Romantic Poets: Thomas De Quincey’s ‘Lake Reminiscences’ and Edward John Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron
Julian North
Pages: 155-169 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291266

Josephine Butler’s Serial Auto/Biography: Writing the Changing Self through the Lives of Others
Rebecca Styler
Pages: 171-184 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291267

Writing the Lives of Dissent: Life Writing, Religion and Community from Edmund Calamy to Elizabeth Gaskell
Felicity James
Pages: 185-197 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291269

Life Writing by the Gosse Family: Family Portraits in Scientific, Evangelical and Auto/biographical Discourses
Kathy Rees
Pages: 199-215 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291270

The Diaries of Mary Seton Watts (1849–1938): A Record of Her Conjugal Creative Partnership with ‘England’s Michelangelo’, George Frederic Watts (1817–1904)
Lucy Ella Rose
Pages: 217-231 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291248

Janet Ross’s Intergenerational Life Writing: Female Intellectual Legacy through Memoirs, Correspondence, and Reminiscences
Claudia Capancioni
Pages: 233-244 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291251
Reflections 

Adventures of an Unromantic Biographer
Daisy Hay
Pages: 247-256 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291274

Better Together: The Paters and Ink Work
Laurel Brake
Pages: 257-265 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291273

A Place for Ingenuity: Re-imagining the Life of James Watt in a Sequence of Poems
Kathleen Bell
Pages: 267-275 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1291272

*       *       *
IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home

 

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7. Women and Archives (3/15/2018) Special Issue, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature

 Women and Archives

Special Issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, edited by Emily Rutter and Laura Engel

In “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory” (2002), Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook assert, “Archives have the power to privilege and to marginalize. They can be a tool of hegemony; they can be a tool of resistance” (13). This dual function of the archive as a vehicle for both reinforcing social inequities and engendering counternarratives frames this special issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, scheduled for publication March 2021. We understand the term archive in a scopic sense, inclusive of institutional vaults of artifacts and records; traces and residues of embodied performances and affective experiences; and/or imaginative literature that renders historically marginalized voices legible. We welcome theoretical essays that build on the work of Jacques Derrida, Diana Taylor, Ann Cvetkovich, among other theorists of the archive, as well as essays that examine the relationship between women’s literary and/or cultural production and archival knowledge. Essays should be 6000-9000 words (excluding notes), should conform to the endnote style of the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, and should be submitted in Microsoft Word.

 

Essay topics may include (but are not limited to):

  • Women authors’ efforts to fill in archival lacunae about slavery, colonialism, and/or Jim Crow segregation
  • The archive, theater, dance, and women’s performance histories
  • Women, material culture, and the archive
  • Resistance to “great men” readings of history through women’s archived diaries, letters, journals, and/or autobiographies
  • Gendered epistemologies and/or the recuperation of intersectional identities in the archive
  • Alternative ways of understanding what constitutes an archive and/or alternative sites of artifactual or historical knowledge
  • The role of the archival researcher in shaping the public’s understanding of women’s writing

We also invite two types of shorter essays: Archives pieces should be 1500-3000 words in length and present new bibliographies, descriptions of particular archives, or narratives of archival research. Innovations pieces should be 2000-5000 words long, and describe new scholarly approaches to the relationship between archives and women’s writing, such as digital humanities projects, or reflections on the effects of such projects on the field.

 

Initial queries and abstracts are encouraged, though final acceptance will be determined by the completed essay.

Please send submissions to Emily Rutter at errutter@bsu.edu and Laura Engel at engell784@duq.edu, and use the subject line “Tulsa Studies: Women and Archives.” Full-length essays, archival pieces, and innovation pieces must be submitted by March 15, 2018.

*       *       *
IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home

 

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8. CNR Symposium on Political Narratives and the Study of Lives (5/19/2017) London, UK

Political Narratives and The Study of Lives Symposium based on Part III of

Routledge International Handbook of Narrative and Life Histories (2016)

Friday 19th May 2017

1 – 5pm, followed by reception

University of East London, University Square Stratford* (Room US4.15)

This symposium is built upon the contributions of narrative scholars to Part III of the recently published Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History. In these papers, researchers use life history and narrative as a means for exploring the world of politics, as it is lived and as it is imagined.  The interest here is not necessarily in the articulation of an explicit political viewpoint, but rather how the narration of a life or lives can reveal power dynamics which often function as the unsaid ligaments that hold stories together.

Broadly speaking, stories – both personal and communal – are pivotal to the way in which politics operates, both in people’s minds (i.e. how they understand politics, and their place within and outside of the formal political sphere) as well as to how politics is practiced.  These stories are not just within the domain of the individual, but are built upon the collective memory of a group, just as they help to create how that memory is mobilised and for what purposes. Through their presentations, contributors to this symposium will demonstrate the potential of political narratives and the life history approach to bridge the gap between individual lives and seismic shifts of history.

Speakers include Linda Sandino, Maria Tamboukou, Ann Phoenix, Suzanna Walters, Neil Ferguson, Shirin Rai and Catarina Kinnvall. Janet Boddy and Giorgia Dona will act as discussants.

Please follow link for full programme.

The symposium is FREE, however for catering purposes we ask that you book a place by following the Eventbrite link:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/political-narratives-and-the-study-of-lives-symposium-tickets-33488911235

*University Square Stratford is located at 1 Salway Road, London E15 1NF. For a map and directions please follow link.

 

*       *       *
IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home

 

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Last updated: 14 April 2017


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