Announce

Special Volume of 10-12 Research Articles Introduced and Edited by Sophie Raynard (Stony-Brook University) and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys (UCF)

Open Cultural Studies (ISSN 2451-3474).

Publisher: De Gruyter Poland.

Contract date: 2/20/2020 Publication date: 1/15/2021

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS:

Manuscripts should not be longer than 8,000 words including bibliography.

The concepts of non-binary, transgender, gender fluid, polygender, etc., in today’s conversations on sexual politics seem to be understood as new concepts as though the realities behind these neologisms do not necessarily encompass all of human history. Scholars in Children’s Literature and Culture Studies or Fairy Tales and Folklore studies, have always come across these representations of non-traditional gender expressions in early-modern literature as well as in historical accounts. Cross-dressing in particular is pervasive in that type of literature, and we know that cross-dressing characters abounded on the early-modern stage and were objects of fascination for their contemporaries. Today’s critics, especially feminists, have been capitalizing on the current interest in gender and sexuality studies and have successfully applied these new definitions to early-modern representations, thus bringing these texts to the forefront of the conversation on gender identity. With such provoking titles as “Gender Trouble,” “The Theatricality of Transformation,” “Erotic and Alien,” “New Bodies, Old Sins”, these studies have encouraged us to perceive and receive early-modern cross-dressing representations, no longer as individual aberrations or expressions of deviancy, but rather as part of a long cultural tradition of non-traditional gender identity and political transgression. By contrast some modern and post-modern popular culture productions dealing with the same issues of gender expression might not always be as progressive as they claim to be. Disney films in particular have consciously tackled the gender issue ever since they faced bitter criticism from feminist scholars, but the question remains whether they have been successful at addressing those biases. Just as early-modern specialists are bringing their own expertise to the table and illustrating the progressivism that always existed in old texts, it would also be opportune to reflect on contemporary productions. In this special issue, we invite scholars of children’s literature and films, and scholars of popular culture from the early-modern to the post-modern eras to explore the topics of gender roles and identity, showing in what ways and to what extent they can be viewed as socio-historical constructs, thus adding new perspectives to the ongoing discussions on sexual politics.

ABOUT THE ACADEMIC JOURNAL: Open Cultural Studies is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal that explores the fields of Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts. It interprets culture in an inclusive sense, in different theoretical, geographical and historical contexts. As an Open Access journal, Open Cultural Studies is committed to increasing public access to scholarship that covers an entire range of social and cultural phenomena both within and beyond the academy. It aims, in particular, to enhance international collaboration among scholars by bringing together researchers from the Global North and the Global South. By bringing together experienced/high-profile and emerging and Third- and First-World scholars, the journal aims to contribute to a wider understanding of culture and promote both innovation and inclusion. The number of downloads in the year 2019 was more than 18 000. Keeping with the trend, next volume should double that number. The independent academic publisher De Gruyter has a history spanning back 270 years. De Gruyter group publishes over 1,300 new titles each year in the humanities, social sciences, STM and law, more than 700 subscription based or Open Access journals, and a variety of digital products.

HOW TO SUBMIT

1) Authors are kindly invited to send an abstract to the Guest Editors at the following email addresses: sophie.raynard@stonybrook.edu; ctrinquet@gmail.com

2) After acceptance of abstracts by editors, authors are kindly invited to register at De Gruyter’s paper processing system at: https://www.editorialmanager.com/culture/default.aspx and submit their contribution.

- Every manuscript should be clearly marked as intended for this special issue and include the title: Gender Fluidity in Early-Modern to Post-Modern Children’s Literature and Culture.

- All papers will go through the Open Cultural Studies’ high standards, quick, fair and comprehensive peer-review procedure. Instructions for authors are available here. In case of any questions, please contact Guest Editors (sophie.raynard@stonybrook.edu; ctrinquet@gmail.com) or Managing Editor (katarzyna.grzegorek@degruyter.com).

3) As an author of Open Cultural Studies you will benefit from:

- transparent, comprehensive and fast peer review managed by our esteemed Guest Editor;

- efficient route to fast-track publication and full advantage of De Gruyter e-technology;

- free language assistance for authors from non-English speaking regions.

CURRENT DEADLINES:

May 10: deadline for abstract submission

May 20: acceptance letter to contributors

August 20: deadline for paper submission review 1= 28 days, review 2 = 14 days

October 1: deadline for peer-reviews October 30: deadline for paper review according to the peer-reviews comments November 20: deadline for paper second review if necessary

November 30: volume sent to press for formatting and copy-editing December 30: deadline for proof revisions

January 2021: publication

Victoria, British Columbia

November 12-14, 2020

The forty-eighth annual conference of the Western Society for French History will be held from November 12-14, 2020, in Victoria, British Columbia.  The theme for this year’s conference is “New Stories, New Ways of Telling Them.” The organizers wish to highlight how incorporating new voices, tools, and approaches can transform both our understanding of the history of France and the Francophone world and the way we share that understanding.

Deadline for proposals: April 1, 2020.  Please send all proposals to Professor Leslie Tuttle, current WSFH President, at president@wsfh.org

*For detailed submission instructions, and for hotel and travel information, please visit the WSFH website, https://www.wsfh.org/conferences

We are excited to welcome this year’s keynote speakers. Matt Matsuda (Professor of History and Academic Dean, New Brunswick Honors College, Rutgers University), will deliver a keynote on Friday evening entitled “Sea of Changes and New Waves: French Histories and Pacific Histories”, followed by a reception at the First People’s Gallery at the Royal B.C. Museum. On Saturday morning, Pascal Bastien (Professeur d’histoire, Université de Québec à Montréal) will deliver the annual Edgar L. Newman Memorial Lecture: “Une Révolution volée? Les émeutes du faubourg Saint-Antoine, 27-28 avril 1789.” Professor Bastien will then be among the participants in a special plenary lunchtime round table on the theme of French History and the Digital Humanities.

We welcome sessions that focus on France and the Francophone world from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era. To deepen membership engagement with the society’s updated mission, we especially welcome proposals that reflect the theme by seeking to include new voices or use new approaches or by deploying digital modes of research and storytelling. In addition to traditional research presentations, we encourage panel proposals featuring innovative and interactive formats, including workshops, roundtables, pre-circulated papers, pecha kucha sessions and discussions of pedagogy and methods. The WSFH welcomes proposals from colleagues in related disciplines and the participation of advanced graduate students.

Following in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel, an increasing number of recent studies show that the Mediterranean basin might be considered as a "borderland" (Darling 2012), "borderscape" (Brambilla 2016) or "Frontier" (Castelnuovo 2000) suggesting that this area is not strictly a border between Christian and Muslim civilization, but a basin in which the two traditions and cultures meet and overlap, with an extraordinary variety of reactions to the hegemonic practices (acceptance, conflict, refusal, dissent). The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars who will discuss, from different perspectives and with a multidisciplinary approach, the variety of themes (topics) which revolve around the common issue of reflecting the problem of borderlands as a consequence of the encounter between Christendom and Ottoman Empire in the Early modern Mediterranean. The starting point of examination will be images, i.e. the usage of images (pictures, mental images, literaly images and other visual representations...) as historical evidences (Burke 2008).

In line with the main goal of the conference, four main sessions are proposed: Images generated after the Battle of Lepanto, War of Candia, Morean War and Ottoman–Venetian War. Special attention will be devoted to the celebration of the victory of Lepanto, that became the model for celebrations of other victories, and to the comparison between the different points of view (those of winners and losers).

All four previously mentioned wars generated minor or greater changes in political boundaries, but political boundaries do not always correspond to artistic, cultural or ideological boundaries or to the boundaries of the religious authorities. Within these four sessions scholars are invited to send abstracts on the topics listed below

The "borderland", "borderscape", "frontier" paradigms in art history, history and geography, regarding the Mediterranean area

How do images document victories and defeats in war conflicts from the Christian point of view? How do other typologies of sources document victories and defeats in war conflicts from the Muslim point of view?

What was the image and the (self) perception of the outcome of the battles among the Ottomans and within the territories under their dominion?

Beyond visible: miraculous images, prophecies, sermons, pamphlets, news… How were images and words used to support faith in the positive outcome of the conflict, and how to spread news, propagate victories or support conversions in the borderlands of Mediterranean?

Artists who cross the boundaries. Is there any evidence of artists producing images for different commissioners with the same or different iconography regarding the Christian-Muslim issues?

What is the difference between written and iconographic evidence?

Great commandants; representations, symbols of the triumph and trophies exposed

The architecture and its image as the marker of the territorial possession.

What kind of symbols were used to represent the other side and how did they influence the shaping of otherness?

Deadline and details:

This call for papers is now open for those researchers who are interested in participating in the conference. Both early stage scholars as well as senior scholars are welcome. Scholars from different study fields are encouraged to give their proposals in order to achieve the goals of interdisciplinarity and plurality of dialogue. They are invited to submit their proposals with a title, an abstract (no more than 500 words) and a brief bio (maximum of 10/12 lines) to Ivana Čapeta Rakić, Ph.D (icapeta@ffst.hr) and Giuseppe Capriotti, Ph.D. (giuseppe.capriotti@unimc.it). Deadline for sending a proposal is 20th March 2020. [Please contact the organizers for the dates of the conference.]

Reimbursement of expenses: CA1829 might be able to reimburse travel and accommodation expenses to a limited number of researchers not yet affiliated to the Action. Applications should be submitted along with the proposals. Selected papers will be published in the book of proceedings.

20–21 July 2020 Lisbon, National Library of Portugal

Organizers : Denis Ribouillault (University of Montréal, Department of Art History) and Ana Duarte Rodrigues (University of Lisbon, Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia).

Although the history of early modern gardens has benefited in recent decades from an increasingly wide range of methodologies, the role played by these spaces in the development of science has been the subject of a relatively small number of inquiries. A majority of them concentrates on botanical gardens and the history of botany [Baldassari 2017], though it is now recognized that mathematics, pneumatics or astronomy found in gardens a privileged ground for experimentation and display. A primary aim of this workshop is to interrogate and document what we could call (anachronistically) «scientific practice» in early modern European gardens.

How were gardens used to advance scientific knowledge? Examples range from the growing of medicinal plants, astronomical observation, physical experiments and so forth. Gardens were also privileged places for teaching and for debates and discussion pertaining to the various branches of natural philosophy. Furthermore, we encourage scholars to pay attention to how this function of gardens as «academies», as platforms for the production and display of knowledge, as stages of scientific sociability and as pedagogical tools, affected the gardens from a formal, artistic, iconographic and hermeneutic point of view.

It is not just a matter of documenting and reconstructing what happened in gardens. More precisely, it is a question of showing how what happened in gardens can lead us to a renewed understanding of the physical appearance (at a given moment) of the gardens themselves. This calls for a fruitful – yet difficult-to-achieve - intermingling of the methodologies of the history of science and of the history of art under the aegis of garden history.

Papers should be about 25 minutes long. Q & A and intensive discussion will follow each presentation. We intend to publish the proceedings of the workshop. Contributors’ travel and accommodation costs will be covered. Please send a proposal of 550 words max. with a title and a short bio to denis.ribouillault@umontreal.ca before April 30, 2020.

This event is sponsored by the research project led by Denis Ribouillault, « Before the ‘Great Divide’: The Shared Language(s) of Art and Science in the Early Modern Period », funded by a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Insight Grant (2019–24) and the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia, University of Lisbon. The workshop will take place during the exhibition at the National Library Jardins Históricos em Portugal, organized by the Associação de Jardins Históricos and the landscape architect Teresa Andersen, with the collaboration of Ana Duarte Rodrigues, as part of the programme Lisboa Verde 2020. Visits of the exhibition and of relevant gardens and monuments are planned for the workshop participants.

Portsmouth (29-30 juin 2020)

Propositions avant le 24 avril 2020

An interdisciplinary conference, University of Pourtsmouth

Keynote speaker: Professor Ann Hughes, Keele University

Numerous sixteenth and seventeenth-century treatises and conduct books promoted patriarchal ideals of female submissiveness and male domination. But in recent years, scholars have begun to question whether the stereotypical image of early modern women as ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’ before the unquestioned male authority figure ever quite tallied with actual experience, with men’s patriarchal authority depicted as hard-fought and contingent in other types of sources and spirited or ‘masculine’ women objects of ambivalent interest. Equally in question is whether we should conceive of the early modern period as a continuum in terms of gender roles, or emphasise the destabilising effect of events like the English Civil War or other conflicts in challenging and disrupting them, whether temporarily or as a driver of more permanent social change. The aim of this conference is act as an interdisciplinary forum for consideration of the arguments surrounding such issues.

This interdisciplinary conference is open to scholars at all academic stages, postgraduate to professor and of different disciplines, including history, literature and art history. Delegates are invited to submit abstracts for individual papers or panels on aspects of this theme, including but not restricted to:

Changes and continuities in gender roles in Britain, Europe and the Atlantic World

Disruptions to gender roles prompted by war or violence

Literary and artistic representations and uses of gender

The role of particular individuals in resistance to gender roles or as agents for change in their conception

Dress and cross-dressing in relation to gender

Medical and other contemporary theories of gender

Gender and crime

Gender and celebrity

The intention is that papers based on conference presentations may be submitted towards a special issue on this theme in the journal Women’s History review.

Please submit proposals of 250-300 words for papers of no more than 20 minutes to Dr Fiona McCall, Senior Lecturer in History, School of Area Studies, History, Politics and Literature, University of Portsmouth at fiona.mccall@port.ac.uk by Friday 24 April 2020.