Lives & Letters Mailing: November 2016

Dear Colleagues,

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

1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
– New Working Paper: A Settler Woman and Business
– From the Blog: Postcards from the LMS Collection
– New Trace! 1896 telegram
– From the Blog: Social Change? What and How?
– New Trace! 1907 Receipt
– From the Blog: An update from the field
2. Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies No.7, Autumn 2016
3. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies Call for Papers Special issue: “Excavating Lives”
4. Biography: an interdisciplinary quarterly 39.2 • Spring 2016
5. The Mass Observation 80th Anniversary Conference
6. Submission and Registration Reminder for QI2017
7. “Generations.” British Women Writers Conference

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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News

There are six new items of project news we would like to share this month:

1. New Working Paper: A Settler Woman and Business
This working paper explores the remaining business papers of a widowed ‘settler woman’ who married into the Eastern Cape Pringle family, Harriet Townsend nee Hockly. The analysis suggests that, contra thinking about separate spheres and a binary division in the gender order, the business career of Harriet Townsend reveals a more complicated situation. To read this working paper, please visit the Working Papers page: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/publications/working-papers/

2. From the Blog: Postcards from the LMS Collection
By way of fourteen ‘postcards’, we at Whites Writing Whiteness wish to share news from our recent trip to the SOAS Archives & Special Collections and more! Below is a list of the postcards which are all available for browsing on the WWW blog:

Postcard 1. The origins of the LMS dockets
Postcard 2. Prepositional politics
Postcard 3. On networks
Postcard 4. On a figuration
Postcard 5. Why they wrote
Postcard 6. The marrying men and the local women
Postcard 7. The Directors
Postcard 8. More on prepositional politics
Postcard 9. A catch-up on dockets
Postcard 10. Squabbling and its meanings
Postcard 11. Who was Mrs Smith? Where are the women?
Postcard 12. ‘The Interior’ and other buzzwords
Postcard 13. William Ross and Fanny Hockly: histoire croissee
Postcard 14. More ‘Native agency’

To read our postcards to you, please visit the blog!
Postcards 1-7: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/7-postcards-from-the-lms-collection/
Postcards 8-14: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/more-postcards-from-the-lms-collection/

3. New Trace! 1896 telegram
This trace concerns a telegram from David Carnegie, a missionary, to the LMS. Here the telegram is contextualised and discussed, with a key question being: What becomes of politics and ethics in relation to events of the past which involved human suffering, if all notions of referentiality are given up? Things happened. Things were written or otherwise documented about this. Without the things that happened, the things that were represented would not have existed.
To read more on this, please visit the Trace: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/10dec1896telegram/

4. From the Blog: Social Change? What and How?
The new edition of a textbook, Ways of Social Change by Garth Massey (2016), presents a number of key questions. These interrelated questions are of considerable import because having a programmatic response to them is essential to a workable theory of social change. They can be summarised as, what is social change and how should this be measured, to what extent does it have to occur to be seen as ‘change’, how and why does it happen at the micro-level, and in what particular context or circumstances? These are key questions that WWW is concerned to explore through the prism of the representational order of letter-writing over the longue durée of the white presence in South Africa. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/what-is-social-change-and-how-does-it-happen/

5. New Trace! 1907 Receipt
This Trace concerns a receipt which was issued by the Civil Commissioner’s Office in Pretoria for a sum of money paid by JHL Findlay to the Civil Commission on behalf of EB Quirk. This receipt issued in Johannesburg is one of many documents archived in the Pringle Collection, the papers of an Eastern Cape family, with most of its contents focused on people and events in the Eastern Cape over the period of the 1830s through to the 1870s. Discussion here is concerned with two of the routine underpinnings of race and racism in the South African context. One is land. The other concerns white figurations linked to state formation.
To read more, please visit the Trace: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/findlay-receipt-1907/

6. From the Blog: An update from the field
We are now in South Africa and have just started work on completing our research on the Forbes collection, one of the family collections with a very long temporal timespan. To read more about what we’re up to, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/cleaning-data-files/

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2. Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies No.7, Autumn 2016

Center for Life Writing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

CONTENTS

Special Section
Biographers Write Not Only the Life, but also the Time……Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
“Each New Project Is like Building the World Anew”……Carl Rollyson

Theory Study
Irony: the Style of “Late” Narrative in Autobiography………Liang Qingbiao
Mourning and Life Writings in the West………Tian Yan, Yin Dexiang
Biographer Study
Singapore’s First Professional Biographer, Lien Shih Sheng……Deborah Chiong

History of Life Writing
Children’s Biography in Japan: from the Meiji Restoration to the End of World War II
……Chen Lingling

Text Study
Tennan Tahara’s Yuan Shikai: Interpretation Deforms the Portraiture……Yuan Qi
Victory in Disguise: Contextualizing Zhao Zhongyuan’s Shakespeare in the Confrontation between Literature and Politics of China in the 1960s……Shao Xueping

Autobiography Study
The Writing Model of Family Memoir: Relative Narrative in Ye Duzhuang’s Heart of Jade ……Shen Chen
A Model of Auto/biography: A Review of Defending Memory—Selected Works from Lidiya……Feng Yuzhi
Text, Culture, and Identity: On Spacial Narration in Ida Pruitt’s A China Childhood ……Zhu Chunfa

Subject Study
Anna May Wong: the Role-Playing and Identification……Liu Jialin
Qian Zhongshu: From a Writer to a Scholar……Zhao Lingling
Lieh Tao：Cross-Sectioning the History of Modern Sino-Japanese Psychiatric Exchange……Xu Xiaohong
John Newman: His Life and Faith……Chen Ruihong
“Jesuit Bark and Bitter Bite”: James Joyce’s Catholic Complex……Zhang Zhichao

Special Study: Life of Vladimir Nabokov
Weaving the Pattern of Life：A Review of Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov……Cao Jiao
Writing the Self Artistically: Reading Vladimir Nabokov ‘s Speaking, Memory……Hou Wanling

From the Biographer
Something on Life Writing……Pang Ruiying

Workshop
Open the Door: I’m Learning Life Writing at Columbia University ……Fu Jiani

From the Editor
The three veteran biographers that we interviewed in this issue are well-known among Chinese readers: Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin whose co-authored biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer won the Pulitzer Prize and had its Chinese version; Carl Rollyson who sees the Chinese version of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon authored by him and his wife. Readers of this issue will definitely benefit from their talk. They all touch upon the issues such as the relationship of biography with biopics, pointing out the differences between the two genres which compete with each other while stimulating each other Their points of view will be extended, we hope, to the international conference “Life Writing and Film Biography in the Trans-Cultural Context” to be hosted in October this year by the Center for Life Writing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The theory of life writing calls for creativity. For theories, no creativity, no vitality. Some papers are worth noticing for this point. Liang Qingbiao puts forth a concept “the style of late narration in autobiography”. He argues that certain autobiographers bear similar writing styles in their late lives. One of such important features is irony, which plays multiple roles in the autobiographical narration. A close examination of this kind of irony may help penetrate the psychological depth of the autobiography. Liang’s concept draws from Edward Said’s “late style” theory. This again confirms the truth that the thriving theory of auto/biography relies on other disciplines for their development.

That one of the drives giving birth to earliest biography is “the impulse to commemorate” is common sense in life writing studies. “Mourning and Life Writing in the West” by Tian Yan and Yin Dexiang studies works of many genres along the history of biography in the West. By investigating the discourse of condolence, their patterns of narration and their cultural values, the paper contributes felicitously to the notion of “impulse to commemorate”.

Three articles on pedagogy appear in the section of Autobiography Study. Shen Chen examines the family memoir, Feng Yuzhi traces “double narratives” that autobiography and biography converge in the same text, and Zhu Chunfa explores the meaning of spatial narrative. The three studies, though focusing on text study, bear a striking feature with broader perspectives.

The Chinese scholars have shown concern on biography in the West and made substantial proper studies for almost a hundred years. We should, however, not neglect our Asian neighbors. Ever since the Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies was launched, we have published studies on Asian biography. This issue goes on to assemble three more articles in the field. Biography in Singapore is not given adequate attention so far in the global academia. Deborah Chiong’s paper presents, with  a full account of and appraisement of Lien Shih Sheng, Singapore’s first professional biographer. What draws our special attention is that this biographer, who came from China and wrote in Chinese, distinguished his biography with Singaporean milieu and salient features of Singaporean biography which differentiates entirely from the Chinese one.

Yuan Qi’s essay examines the Japanese biographer Tennan Tahara’s Yuan Shikai, the subject being a pivot figure in politics of the late Qing Dynasty, China. Understandably Yuan Shikai is a colossus that historians and readers pay special attention to. What makes the case even more intriguing is how, after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, the Japanese people looked at Yuan Shikai against the backdrop of severe conflicts in the Japan-China relations. With his study of Tennan Tahara’s political stand, his point of views and writing techniques, Yuan Qi reveals a Japanese perspective of evaluating Yuan Shikai. Chen Lingling’s essay sorts out Japanese children’s biography, an important sub-genre, in the period from the Meiji Restoration down to the end of World War II, whereby certain characters of Japanese culture are evidenced out of the study.

The subject of the biography is a significant issue in the study of life writing. The subject study is also one of the section in which we receive most papers. This section in this issue features five essays, three of which address the renowned subjects: Zhao Lingling makes a meticulous examination of the respectable Chinese scholar Qian Zhongshu, focusing on his change from a writer to a scholar around the 1950s. Chen Ruihong explores John Newman’s conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism. And Zhang Zhichao analyzes how the Catholic Church influences James Joyce’s life. All the three papers set out their research from the unnoticed details in those subjects’ lives and deepen our knowledge of those subjects by a new interpretation and a full study. Another two papers touch upon historical figures dug out from age-old archives. Xu Xiaohong provides a study of the Chinese psychopathologist Lieh Tao, who returned from Japan and died prematurely. Liu Jialin’s article traces the life of the Chinese American actress Huang Liushuang who was active in the American and European cinema. The two subjects, though obsolete today, should not be left behind our memory. They had notable impacts in their own fields at their time, not to mention that their lives and experiences may maintain valuable materials for life writing studies.

In the past thirty years, Vladimir Nabokov has attracted continuous attention in the Chinese academia and among biography scholars, a phenomenon that propels us into setting up a section exclusive to the study of Nobokov. Two essays by young scholars make detailed analyses and interpretations on the subject, though through different lens. Hou Wanling’s “Writing the Self Artistically” discusses Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory, whereas Cao Jiao’s “Weaving the Pattern of Life” reviews scholastically Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov. The former proves that Nobokov transforms his own life into a piece of art by way of reconstructing his memory and dispelling conventional ethics; the latter attempts to illustrate how a Russian noble youth is forced into exile and later becomes an American novelist. Also the paper explores the thoughts and feelings that Nabokov’s art pattern contains. The perspectives that the two essays adopt, either from the work to the novelist, or from the novelist to the work, are important paths for the study of literary biography.

One of the aim to set up this journal is, through biography study, to provide theoretical support for life writing. It is of great necessity to establish life writing programme at universities if we hope that biography prosper. Such programme is called “non-fiction creative writing” in the USA, the most prestigious one being in Columbia University. A biographer herself, Fu Jiani has had written quite some Chinese biographies. She pursued this programme in Columbia University two years ago. At our invitation Fu presents an essay, recounting her living history studying life writing at the university. Those professors’ teaching styles, especially workshops, in her account are good teaching pedagogy for us to notice and model on.

The writing experiences of Chinese biographers also merit our attention. It is a widely-accepted notion that the biography subject should be properly determined, first-hand materials should be collected as far as possible, materials should go through a keen process of scrutinizing and differentiating, the narrative should not eulogize, or conceal. Yet in the real-life context of our culture and tradition, it is easier said than done. Pang Ruiyin, a senior biographer, informs us of how he cracks the hard nut in his extensive writing experience. His essay will lead us into the understanding of a biographer’s toil and gaining something out of it.

August, 2016
Call for Articles
Life writing studies, which have moved onto the central stage in the academia, have gained ever more attention both in and outside China. The biannual journal entitled the Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies aims to stimulate Chinese life writing studies, provides a forum for scholars of various disciplines both at home and abroad, attracts and promotes specialists in the field.

In an attempt to bring out the latest development of the research for life writing, the Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies seeks to, in modern visions and views, explore theoretical, historical, cultural aspects of life writing, focus on case studies, textual analysis, feature studies and deal with issues in the life writing practices. It also takes as its fundamental task expanding and enhancing the substance of life writing studies and stimulating live discussions of all the issues accordingly. The sections in the journal include interviews, book reviews, and biography-writings in the form of various media, in addition to articles. Long-length articles (10,000 Chinese characters; or 8,000 English words) or short essays (4,000 Chinese characters; or 2,000 English words) sparkling with insights and originality are welcomed.

The journal accepts submissions in Chinese or English. Articles and interviews should not exceed 10,000Chinese characters, or 8,000 English words, notes included. Reviews should be about4,000-5000 Chinese characters; or 2,000-3000 English words in length. Submissions should be double-spaced, in a Times New Roman 12 point font; or in Chinese Song character small 4font. Paragraphs should be indented, rather than separated with a space. Footnotes are serialized on each pages separately, with the sign ①,②,③ …. Citations should be formatted according to the MLA Style or the standard sheet in the author’s field. Acknowledgments (if applicable) should be given in a footnote at the beginning of the notes section. Please include a 150-word abstract and a biographical note. The journal follows a double-blind peer review policy. Submissions should be previously unpublished and should not currently be under consideration by other journals.
The author is in charge of his/her own academic honesty. All images must be used by permission only.

Work should be submitted by e-mail in Word format to the email address: sclw209@sina.com

Two complimentary copies of the issue will be sent to the author when his/her work is published.

The Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies is based in SJTU Center for Life Writing. We welcome suggestions and proposals, from which we believe the journal will surely benefit.

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

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3. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies Call for Papers Special issue: “Excavating Lives”

The business of excavating lives becomes all the more urgent when set against the prevailing anxiety surrounding loss, memory, and witnessing. As we experience cultural losses such as the death of the last British survivor of the WWI trenches, come closer to the end of the lives of the last survivors of the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, try to piece together forced disappearances in places such as Chile and Argentina, and attempt to navigate the onslaught of Alzheimer’s victims, questions about the past and our access to the roads and inlays into these lives rise to the forefront.

This special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (32.3, Autumn 2017), “Excavating Lives,” seeks discussions about the ways in which life narratives unearth the past. We invite submissions on any topic related to discovery and the absent, hidden, or veiled life. How are lives layered, erased, replaced, and/or preserved? And, how have life narratives changed over time to make room for new definitions of the genre? In the widest sense of the metaphor, we wish to consider life narratives within the context of liminal spaces, borders, and hidden places to look at lives in an archaeological context (real and metaphoric), across political and social divides, through conflict and resolution, trauma and healing, forgetting and remembering, censuring and memorializing.

With the intention of crafting a multidisciplinary special issue, we welcome essays from all disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.
Paper topics can include, but are not limited to:
• Life as palimpsest
• Life narrative as discovery
• (Dis)closure and revelation
• Recording lives (written, audio, visual, archival)
• Exposure – life narrative and human rights
• Visibility/invisibility in life narratives
• Life narratives and borders
• Life narratives and absences/appearances
• Life narratives and multi-mediated/digital lives
• Memory and crisis
• Personal and public memory
• Narrative and truth
• The space between fiction and nonfiction
• Truth as exposure
• History’s inaccuracies/anxieties
• The importance of life writing in ecology
• The importance of life writing in pedagogy

Submission instructions
Send original articles of 6,000-8,000 words (including works cited and notes) to Amy-Katerini Promodou (amypro@ucy.ac.cy) & Nicoletta Demetriou (nicoletta.demetriou@wolfson.ox.ac.uk) on or before November 30, 2016. Inquiries are also welcome.

Authors should include a fifty-word abstract and two to four keywords with their submissions. In order to ensure a confidential peer review process, please remove any identifying information, including citations that refer to you as the author in the first person. Cite previous publications, etc. with your last name to preserve your anonymity in the reading process. Include your name, address, email, the title of your essay, and your affiliation in a cover letter or cover sheet for your essay. It is the author’s responsibility to secure any necessary copyright permissions, and essays may not progress into the publication stage without written proof of right to reprint. Images with captions must be submitted in a separate file as 300 dpi (or higher) tiff files. All essays must follow the format of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.) and the a/b Style Sheet, which may be found on the journal’s website at www.tandfonline.com/raut. Essays submitted for the special issue but not selected may be considered as general submissions.

Amy Prodromou is an early-career researcher who completed her Ph.D. at Lancaster University (UK).  She has received MAs in English and Creative Writing from Southern Connecticut State University (USA) and the University of Sydney (Australia). Amy is Reviews Editor for Life Writing journal and runs the Women’s Life Writing Network (WLN), a research forum for researchers and practitioners of women’s life writing (www.womenslifewriting.org). Her publications include contributions to Identity and Form (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature, 2013), and “‘That Weeping Constellation’: Navigating Loss in ‘Memoirs of Textured Recovery’” in Life Writing (2012). Her fiction has been published in various journals and magazines, most recently in Flax, the publishing imprint of Lancaster’s Litfest.  Her latest publication, Navigating Loss in Women’s Contemporary Memoir, was published in 2015.

Nicoletta Demetriou is Research Fellow in Ethnomusicology and Life Writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and Tutor in Narrative Non-Fiction on Oxford’s Master of Studies in Creative Writing. She has written on Cypriot traditional music, its history and historiography, and is co-editor, with Jim Samson, of Music in Cyprus (Ashgate 2015). Her current project, The Cypriot Fiddler, tells the life stories of professional traditional musicians on both sides of the Cypriot divide, combining methods from ethnomusicology and life writing. The project was chosen by the British Academy as a case study in 2015, and was featured on the British Academy’s blog. The Cypriot Fiddler documentary, released in 2016, was entirely funded by members of the public through a crowd-sourcing campaign.

Editorial information
• Co Editor: Amy-Katerini Prodromou
• Co Editor: Nicoletta Demetriou

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4. Biography: an interdisciplinary quarterly 39.2 • Spring 2016

Editors’ Note

Articles
Stephen Taylor Marsh, “Self-Sacrifice in the Autobiographical Narration of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King”

Since David Foster Wallace’s 2008 suicide, commentators have searched for autobiographical confession in his work. Through a reading of his post-humous novel, The Pale King, this essay contends that Wallace divides his authorial self into three distinct entities. In so doing, he simultaneously obscures his flesh-and-blood life from the reader, complicates the persona of his implied author, and sacrifices the selfhood of his character narrator, “David Wallace.” Ultimately, these moves challenge the methodological priority granted to the self in autobiographical criticism.

Vanessa Guignery, “Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson—A Dialogue with Biography”

This article examines Jonathan Coe’s biography of British experimental writer B. S. Johnson (1933–1973), Like a Fiery Elephant, which may be called a postbiography. The essay explores the ways in which ways Coe simultaneously deconstructs some of the conventions of literary biography and echoes innovative devices developed by Johnson in his novels.

Pramod K. Nayar, “Radical Graphics: Martin Luther King, Jr., B. R. Ambedkar, and Comics Autobiography”

Graphic auto/biography offers a new medium and genre mode in which social issues like racism and oppression may be discussed for the purpose of critical literacy. The article examines, as case studies, a biography, Ho Che Anderson’s King, and an adapted autobiography, Bhimayana, by Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand, with art work by Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam. The essay identifies three major components of this critical literacy: the humanizing of history, the construction of personal and public history and the making of the human icon.

Suchitra Samanta, “An Interpretive Auto/Biographical Reading of Studio-Posed Photographs: Telling My Mother’s Life in Colonial and Post-Colonial India”

I “tell” my mother’s life in photographs of her—specifically those taken in studios—but as more than a chronological life story. My intent is to rediscover the person that she was, or was not, but chose to present. A deeply personal as well as feminist sensibility inspires this essay, to give voice and substance to a long silence. As colonial India approached independence, Ma successfully availed of opportunities for women to study medicine. But she would confront, in her circumstances and in her time, obstacles to her aspirations, and she died in her mid-forties. I draw from historical research on photography and British initiatives to train Indian women in medicine, as well as other “texts,” to provide context and dimension for my reading of the photographs. I conclude with other possible narratives (cultural, religious, and philosophical) that contribute to my endeavors, a half-century after her death.

Sheila J. Nayar, “The Enslaved Narrative: White Overseers and the Ambiguity of the Story-Told Self in Early African-American Autobiography”

While the classic American slave narratives, like those by Frederick Douglass, attract much attention and are given wide institutional currency, the earlier narratives—indeed, the progenitors of one of the most American of literary genres—receive comparatively scant attention. This article addresses those incipient narratives (for example, by Pomp, Venture, and Grimes), demonstrating how they inadvertently expose the challenges inherent in bringing slaves, who were often non-literate, into the print-storytelling fold. Through close readings that draw from orality-literacy studies, the essay exposes stark but intriguing signs of the narratives’ heavy reframing and/or interpolation by white “editors”—sometimes to the point of erasing the very legitimacy of early, “authentic” black narration. Such signs include an overemphasis on numerical categories (dates, measurements, etc.), as well as repeated, disquieting shifts in diction, tone, and syntax that suggest a “writerly” modification of prose. In this way, “The Enslaved Narrative” brings to the fore the complex, and perhaps unavoidably awkward, ways in which, in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, slavery, memoir, and authorship commingled—at least until slaves like Douglass could harness the literacy skills and epistemic license to become masters of their own words.

Reviews
Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns, by Katja Kurz, Reviewed by James Dawes

Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary, by Hervé Guibert, Reviewed by Joanna Bourke

Capitalist Family Values, Gender, Work, and Corporate Culture at Boeing, by Polly Reed Myers, Reviewed by Sarah Moore

—
Anjoli Roy
Managing Editor
The Center for Biographical Research
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
1800 East-West Road, Henke 325
Honolulu, HI 96822
Tel: (808) 956-3774
Email: biograph@hawaii.edu

Find us on Facebook and Twitter at @CBRHawaii!

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

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5. The Mass Observation 80th Anniversary Conference
Celebrating 80 years of the Mass Observation movement

10th-11th July 2017
Jubilee building, University of Sussex

Confirmed Speakers:
Matt Cook (Birkbeck)
Joe Moran (Liverpool John Moores)
Dr Lucy Noakes (University of Brighton)

Call for Papers:

In 1937, a letter signed by Tom Harrisson (anthropologist), Humphrey Jennings (film maker) and Charles Madge (poet and journalist) was published in the pages of the New Statesman. It invited volunteers, from all walks of life, to participate in a new research project, which would be “anthropology at home . . . a science of ourselves”. This letter announced the founding of Mass Observation which, over the last 80 years, has developed a unique interdisciplinary people-centred approach to social research.

From its rapid rise to the status of national institution in the Popular-Front culture of the late 1930s, it has passed through a number of incarnations. These include (but are not limited to): observing the everyday in late 1930s Bolton on a shoestring budget; amassing a collection of diaries by over 500 home front civilians; collecting ‘home intelligence’ for the Ministry of Information for a short period during the early 1940s; working as a commercial market-research company during the 1950s/1960s; becoming an archive at the University of Sussex in the 1970s (now at The Keep) and being relaunched in the 1980s as the Mass Observation Project, a longitudinal life writing project, which captures the experiences, thoughts and opinions of ‘everyday’ people in 21st century Britain.

This conference seeks to reflect all aspects of Mass Observation and beyond. The conference organisers invite submissions from across the disciplines and proposals from those at all stages of their career, including postgraduates, doctoral students and early career researchers.

We welcome proposals for individual 20 minute papers, as well as submissions of panels with chairs

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Everyday life
• Life writing
• MO and the Second World War
• Anthropology and Mass Observation
• Representation of identity in MO
• Surrealism
• Documentary movement
• The Mass Observation founders
• Methodology
• Community engagement
• 20th and 21st century Britain
• The Mass Observation Project
• Mass Observation in the digital world
• Mass Observation and beyond

Proposals (300 words max) and brief biographies should be submitted to moa@sussex.ac.uk by Monday 16th January 2017.
www.massobs.org.uk

Jessica Scantlebury

The Mass Observation Archive
The Keep
Woollards Way
Brighton
BN1 9BP
j.c.scantlebury@sussex.ac.uk
+441273 337515

www.massobs.org.uk
www.thekeep.info
twitter.com/MassObsArchive

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6. Submission and Registration Reminder for QI2017

The Thirteenth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI2017) is now taking submissions for papers, posters, and panel presentations. The deadline is 1 December 2016.

http://www.icqi.org/home/submission/

Be sure to take advantage of the early registration rates which end 1 December: http://www.icqi.org/registration/

Please visit our FAQ page if you have questions about submitting or registering: http://icqi.org/faq/

Respectfully,

ICQI Staff

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7. “Generations.” British Women Writers Conference

Dear list,

As the fall conference season is winding down, we’d like to send you another reminder that proposals for the upcoming British Women Writers Conference in Chapel Hill, NC, are due January 15, 2017. The conference dates are June 21-24, 2017.

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For its 25th annual meeting, the British Women Writers Conference invites papers and panel proposals considering the theme of “Generations.” As we look back on a quarter-century of feminist scholarship and practice within British Studies, we want to celebrate those who have defined the British Women Writers Association’s past and nurture those who will shape its future. Of course, even within literary traditions or scholarly networks, generational transitions are rarely ever easy or smooth. Such transitions may be accompanied by paradigm shifts, struggles to be heard, or difficulty letting go. We therefore welcome investigations into the complexities of generational exchange and transition in women’s writing. Papers may focus on generation as a biological, cultural, social, historical, or political process as well as on attendant manifestations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and contemporary scholarly discourses. In the end, we hope that a comprehensive exploration of generations will help illuminate shifts in literary studies, women’s writing, and critical practice.

By January 15, 2017, send 300-word abstracts for paper proposals, along with a brief bio (in one document) to bwwc2017@gmail.com. Panel proposals should include individual paper abstracts, short speaker bios, as well as a brief panel description, if applicable (in one document). All proposals must engage the conference theme and relate to British women’s writing during the long eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Graduate students are encouraged to apply for a travel grant sponsored by the BWWA.

• Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
  “GENERATIONS AND RELATIONS”: parents & children; mentors & mentees; ancestors & descendants; inter/extra-generational friendships; generational conflict
• “GROWING PAINS”: theories of change & the passing of time; obsolescence of cultural practices & social structures; new technologies & techniques; biopower, eugenics, social design
• “SEASONS”: weddings, honeymoons, anniversaries; political & economic phases; schedules, timetables, deadlines; geological time, astronomical time, relativity; retrospectives & futurisms; literary periodization
• “SEEDS”: horticulture, cultivation, conservation; cuisine & consumption; changing landscapes & cityscapes
•  “GENRES OF GENERATION”: proceedings, requiems, obituaries; borrowings, adaptations, revisions; multi-generational texts; narrative inventions & residuals; changing aspects & visual arts; performing change & changing performances
• “PHASES OF HUMAN BODIES”: reproduction, pregnancy, birth, maternity; childhood & adolescence; theories of biological (re)generation & healing; carework & disability; discourses of aging bodies or minds & ageism; death & mourning
• “BWWC’S 25TH”: 1992-2017: reminiscences & outlooks; critical & feminist prehistories; anxieties of influence; the state of the field; women’s writing as a category of analysis; scholarship as pedagogy; interdiscipinarity; whither BWWC?
  The homepage of the 2017 British Women Writers Conference is up and running, including a preliminary program draft: https://bwwc17.web.unc.edu. Also follow us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/bwwc17), Twitter (@BWWC2017), and Instagram (bwwc2017).–
  *       *       *IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
  International Auto/Biography Association
  sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home——————————

   

   

  Last updated: 14 November 2016

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