Category: Posts

Protest Europe

Award-winning British publishing house Comma Press, in partnership with the University of Angers, is looking to build link with other publishers, festivals and universities across Europe to partner with on an international collaboration project designed to re-engage readers and writers with people’s history and shared, common cultural heritage through a series of commissions focusing on the history of European protest. Exploring the links between different protest movements across Europe, these commissions will bring together publishers, writers, historians, activists, translators, researchers and universities to collaborate on the creation of a series of short stories, semi-fictionalising this history in a way which shows shared goals, influences and strategies.

The stories will be written by fiction writers working in close collaboration with experts (historians and living activists) who will also write short afterwords to accompany the finished stories. The stories and afterwords will be translated and published simultaneously across various language editions. The project will also host public events and develop digital materials to celebrate and better understand these pivotal moments of ‘popular resistance’ – protests which, in some small way, helped to shape modern Europe.

If you or your organisation would like to find out more about this project, email coordinator Ra Page at ra.page@commapress.co.uk.

The Society for the Study of the Short Story invites proposals for its 15th conference to take place in Lisbon, 27-30 June 2018. The conference theme is “Beyond History: The Radiance of the Short Story”. The full cfp and further information can be found on the conference website.

 

Twentieth-Century British Periodicals: Words and Art on the Printed Page, 1900-1999

4 July 2017

Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, Redlands Road, Reading, UK

Current scholarship on twentieth-century periodicals is moving beyond the study of the ‘little’ magazine and avant-garde publications. Many mainstream and specialist periodicals, including tabloids, broadsheets, illustrated newspapers, illustrated magazines, fashion magazines, ‘slick’ magazines, women’s magazines, art periodicals, trade and specialist periodicals, pulps, reviews, and political and campaigning magazines have yet to receive sustained critical attention.

This interdisciplinary one-day * conference, coordinated by Dr Kate Macdonald, University of Reading, and Emma West, Cardiff University, will bring together scholars and collectors to discuss the magazines, newspapers, journals, dailies, weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies and quarterlies of British cultural life in the pre-Internet twentieth century. The focus of the discussion will be on the producers and consumers of these ephemeral products, to attempt to map out their networks. By focusing on both words and images, this conference aims to bring the specialist collector and the art historian to the table, to share knowledge of commercial and artistic figures and movements with publishing and book historians.

We invite abstracts relating to these topics:

• publishers
• editors
• illustrators
• photographers
• graphic design, art direction, advertising and publicity
• columnists
• magazine fiction
• the sporting pages
• the children’s comic and the teen magazine
• fashions on the page
• monthly domestic instruction
• freelance writing
• the reviewer and the reviews
• ephemerality and collectability
• pre- and post-war periodicals
• the bibliographers and the academy

Please send abstracts of 300 words or less, plus a brief account of your teaching, publications or research in these fields, by 31 January 2017, to k.macdonald@reading.ac.uk.

* If enough abstracts are received to warrant a second day, we will extend the conference to 5 July.

The Fifth Biennial John Updike Society Conference

Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, Serbia – June 1 – 4, 2018

THE FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

The Fifth Biennial John Updike Society Conference will be the first one outside the United States of America, and it will take place in Serbia. John Updike visited Belgrade in 1978—it was then the capital of Yugoslavia and now it is the capital of Serbia. Updike also visited Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, which was then one of the six constitutive republics of Yugoslavia. In both cities Updike gave important interviews for magazines and TV stations.

Papers on any aspect of John Updike’s work or life will be considered, but topics that are especially appropriate can be found on the society’s website: http://blogs.iwu.edu/johnupdikesociety. One-page proposals for 15- to 20-minute papers on all aspects of Updike’s life and work and especially suggested topics should be sent, along with a brief one- or two-paragraph bio, to conference director Biljana Dojčinović – jus5thconference@gmail.com – by the 31^st of January 2018.