AustLit

The 2017 ASAL conference, Looking In, Looking Out: China and Australia is in full preparation mode, and will be held in Melbourne, July 11-14, at the city campuses of Latrobe University, Melbourne University, Library at the Dock and the Wheeler Centre at the State Library. All sites are in the CBD and walkable from each other or accessible on the free City Circle Tram route. Booking accommodation in the CBD, or in inner suburbs such as Fitzroy, Carlton, Richmond or Footscray, on the train or tramlines, would be best.

We’ve had many responses to the call for papers and paper-givers will be notified in the next week. We’ve also had wonderful response from Chinese students and senior scholars, and are assembling a great list of participants. Keynote speakers include Professor Wang Labao, translator Professor Li Yao, inaugural Billiton Chair of Australian Studies at Renmin University Beijing, Professor David Walker, writer Alice Pung, and many others. Don’t miss out – we are developing the conference website and online registration system and will go live soon.

Email ASAL2017@latrobe.edu.au to register your interest on our conference mailing list.

To update your membership please click here

11-14 July 2017, Melbourne

The 2017 ASAL conference will ask its presenters to continue to think about Australian literature at home and in the world following on from recent conferences highlighting the worlding of Australian literature, the centrality of indigenous literature, and the changing imperatives and pressures in the teaching of Australian literature in Australia and beyond. This conference asks contributors to look inwards and outwards: examining the continuing fascination with place, context and locality in the face of the global.

One of the highest concentrations of Australian Studies centres in the world is in China. This conference invites Chinese and Australian scholars of Australian literature to come together with other international scholars of Australian literature to examine the teaching and study of Australian literature in the context of this transnational interest.

Offers for single 20 minute papers considering any and all aspects of ‘Australian’ literature broadly conceived are welcomed. Conference themes include:

• Literature and landscape
• Cross cultural teaching
• Theorising diaspora
• Theorising transcultural literary production
• Teaching Australian literature in China/Australia/ the world
• Chinese Australian writing
• Children’s literature
• Translation of Australian children’s books in China
• The idea of place in Australian literature
• Translating Australian literature
• Literature in translation
• Reading Chinese literature in Australia
• Reception of Australian literature
• Studying literature in China and Australia –similarities and differences

Please submit the following to ASSC.Research@latrobe.edu.au with subject heading “ASAL Conference”:

1) Title of Paper

2) 250 word abstract

3) Name, position, organisation and brief biography (100 words maximum).

Extended deadline for abstracts: 28 February 2017

Extended deadline PDF available here

A PDF flyer is available here

Thursday 20 April - Friday 21 April, 2017, University of Newcastle, NSW.

The Internet has changed the production and mediation of Australian literature: books are often sold online as ebooks or through e-retailers, such as The Book Depository, and discourse about Australian literature is increasingly digital, whether in the form of online reviewing sites, such as The Sydney Review of Books, customer reviews on Amazon, or discussions on social reading sites like Goodreads. Simone Murray has termed this the ‘digital literary sphere’ (2015), and demonstrated how such discourse alters the way that books are read and perceived.

Rather than focusing on purely technological changes, such as the rise of ebooks and social reading sites, this mini-conference also seeks to understand how the internet has altered literary aesthetics. Recent scholarship—such as Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Bruce Stirling’s ‘An Essay on the New Aesthetic’ (2012), and Florian Cramer’s ‘What Is “Post-Digital”?’ (2013)—has demonstrated how digital technology has produced a unique aesthetics that has been re-incorporated into non-digital media.

We invite participants to consider these and other aspects of the relationship between Australian literature and the internet. Possible Topics:

Literature and the aesthetics of the Internet

The Internet in Australian poetry

Representations of digital technology in Australian literature

Literary publishing in the Internet age

Readers and the Internet

Genre fiction and the Internet

Book reviewing and literary criticism after the Internet

Teaching literature with digital technology

Literature as a site of resistance to digital technology

Australian literature and the digital archive

We welcome submissions of both individual papers and complete panels on relevant topics. Abstracts of 250-words are due by 15 February 2017, and should be sent to Keri Glastonbury (keri.glastonbury@newcastle.edu.au.)

Convenors:

Dr Keri Glastonbury (keri.glastonbury@newcastle.edu.au)

Dr Emmett Stinson (emmett.stinson@newcastle.edu.au)

6-9 July 2016, UNSW Canberra and the National Library of Australia

Abstracts due by Friday 26 February

WEBSITE NOW LIVE :

https://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/conferences/ASAL2016

Capital-Empire-Print-Dissent will seek to articulate the ways in which the institutions of government, the arts, the universities and the heritage sectors have forged what we now call ‘Australian’ literature; and the relationship between, on the one hand, traditionalists, heritage-makers, administrators and purveyors of cultural inheritance and, on the other, the iconoclasts, dissenters, rebels, and activists equally drawn to centres of governmental, financial, cultural and intellectual power.

Capital-Empire-Print-Dissent assumes the ‘worlding’ of ‘Australian’ literature but looks for structured histories of its formation, not least in the interconnected pasts of Empire and indigenous belonging. More broadly it questions the directions of twenty-first-century ‘postcolonialism’ and explores the ongoing and shifting political relationships between metropolis and (former) empire, colonies and the nation, federations and the state, capitals and their hinterlands, nations and trade zones; and all of their discontents.

Offers for single 20 minute papers considering all aspects of ‘Australian’ literature broadly conceived are welcomed, and could address:

• The violence of silence and transported guilt: Enlightenment frontiers and industrial wars of settlement

• Myths of beginning and colonial federalism

• Antipodean nightmares and colonial utopia

• Transnational indigeneity, tent embassies and literary sovereignty

• Settler modernity and the racial state

• Garrisons of the Republic: The military, the monarchy and literary loyalty

• Documentalism, institutionalism and the bureaucratic literary

• Cultures of conflict, memorialism and (post)colonial war

• Dreams of domesticity and suburban belonging

• A bush capital and the global city: landscape and streetscape

• Global empire, migration and the placing of diversity

• Pigeons and possums: Animal inhabitation and urban ecoscapes

• Pulp places, urban pleasures and popular readerships

• Archives of nation-making and the memory of the memo

• City-sex and suburb-sex

• Metaphorical territories, penal colonies and off-shore incarceration

Proposals for panels of no more than three speakers with a nominated chair on a shared theme are also welcome.

Topical Masterclasses are proposed for the morning of 6 July on these two topics:

Transindigenous and comparative frames for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing:

Drawing on the expertise of Professor Chadwick Allen and multi-award winning writer Melissa Lucashenko, this workshop masterclass is open to scholars interested in discussing the ways in which indigenous literature connects beyond, within, through and against national state formations, with specific reference to local and community identified Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers.

Archiving the now: Drawing on the outstanding manuscript holdings in the UNSW Canberra Academy Library special collections, this workshop masterclass attends to the recent material past of contemporary Australian literature from the last thirty to forty years. How do we deal with records of literary production that feel immediate and are yet archival? Are there new ways to consider the biographical, historical and material registers of literary culture in both their paper and digital forms? Facilitators include Professor Lyn McCredden and special collections librarians.

Both masterclasses are open to all scholars, but preference will be given to postgraduate and early career researchers, including those without current institutional affiliations.

Please submit titles and 250 word abstracts for proposed papers by Friday 26 February, 2016 to Shirley Ramsay: s.ramsay@adfa.edu.au

A PDF is available here

17-19 April 2016, BreakFree Grand Pacific, Bulcock Beach, Caloundra, Qld.

The ASALvets are heading north in 2016 – to Caloundra, the most southerly of the resort towns on the Sunshine Coast, some 90km north of Brisbane. Caloundra itself has some interesting literary connections: for example, Vance and Nettie Palmer lived and worked there for five years in the late 1920s, and it’s the setting for Vance’s award-winning novel The Passage (1930). But the Sunshine Coast region more broadly, extending north to Noosa and Cooloola and west to Woodford, Maleny and Montville in the hinterland, is bristling with historical and contemporary literary associations (Judith Wright, Nancy Cato, Eleanor Dark, Gary Crew and David Williamson are just some of the names that crop up).

The overarching theme of the two-day conference will be ‘literary regionalism’, and we invite offers of papers that engage with that theme at some level. This might be done by exploring aspects of the literary and cultural heritage of the Sunshine Coast (broadly defined, as above), either in the visions of individual writers or in the cultural networks formed at different moments in its history. Attention to the strong traditions of environmental writing in this semi-tropical region of beaches, rainforests and wetlands would also be welcome. The brief might even extend to more theoretical or comparative considerations of literary regionalism; but we hope the main focus – as with all ASALvet conferences so far – will be on concrete and particular instances.

The program is available here: PROGRAM

A PDF of the registration form is available here: REGISTRATION FORM

Pat Buckridge:

p.buckridge@griffith.edu.au

Symposium – Rediscovering Again: Christina Stead // Elizabeth Harrower

Thursday 3 – Friday 4 December 2015

University of New South Wales, Sydney

REGISTER HERE

PROGRAM AVAILABLE HERE

13-17th April, 2015: enquiries to susan.plever@bigpond.com

Monday 13th April: Meet at MONA bar at 4 pm for welcome drinks, courtesy of MONA and Island Magazine. MONA can be accessed by ferry from the Brook Street Ferry terminal. Last ferry returning to Hobart leaves MONA at 6 pm.

Tuesday 14th April: Papers at the Quest, Studio Room

9.00-10.30

Elizabeth Webby ‘The Early History of the Theatre Royal, Hobart’

Margaret Barbalet ‘Feeling Exile: Growing up in Smithton’

10.30-11.00 Morning tea

11.00-12.30

Ken Stewart ‘James McAuley: His Last Ten Years’

Dennis Haskell ‘“No image can ever be deserted”: The Poetry and Poetics of Vivian Smith’

AFTERNOON 2.00-3.00 pm Tour of the Theatre Royal, $12 per person

EVENING: Free, Studio Room will be available for conversation, drinks, readings etc.

Wednesday 15th April: Papers at the Quest, Studio Room

9.00-10.30

Alison Alexander 'Visions of Jane Franklin'

Julian Croft ‘Birth of a Nation: Jane My love, Catherine Shepherd’

10.30-11.00 Morning tea

11.00-12.30

Peter Pierce ‘Recent Tasmanian Historical Fiction’

Susan Lever ‘Uncovering Convict Traces: The Case of Nicholas Stanley’

AFTERNOON: Free, suggested visit to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, or nearby Distilleries

EVENING: 6 pm. meet for drinks before dinner at Ethos Restaurant, 100 Elizabeth Street, at 6.30 pm

Thursday 16th April: 8.30 am–4.30 pm Bus tour to Tasman Peninsula led by Peter Pierce (bus will return via the airport).

END of Conference

Tasmania continues to inspire both revisions of history and historical fiction and film. ASALvets invite papers that consider any aspect of the literature and history of Tasmania, or the relationship between history and fiction for our three-day conference at the Quest Waterfront hotel in Hobart in 14-16 April 2015. The conference will include a trip to the Tasman Peninsula and a visit to MONA. Abstracts and expressions of interest may be sent to Julian Croft:

juliancroft@bigpond.com

Accommodation will be at the Quest Waterfront and nearby hotels around Sullivans Cove and Salamanca. We recommend making early bookings - booking.com has some good deals at present. Please let Julian or Susan Lever (susan.plever@bigpond.com) know if you plan to come.

6-8 February 2016, The Women’s College, University of Sydney.

‘So how do we negotiate the perilous terrain that lies between humour and offensiveness, or free speech and cultural respect, in a pluralist society?’ Michael Pickering and Sharon Lockyer, Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour (2009).

Papers are invited from all disciplines on all topics related to the study of humour, but we are particularly interested in those that take account of the limits of humour: when things cease to be funny; when humour offends or causes outrage; when humour becomes bad taste or bad faith; when humour is opposed or censored; when humour becomes oppression. Even for the broad-minded who boast a good sense of humour, there will be many times when it is tested and challenged. Satire, especially, often sets out to be offensive, and stand-up comics can deliberately push boundaries. Who, or what, determines where humour begins and ends? What about those who are hurt by humour?

Does humour have any real power or political impact? Comedian Peter Cook ironically and famously compared his Establishment Club in Soho with those Weimar cabarets ‘which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War’. What about when humour is complicit with an oppressive status quo? Humour Studies is an expansive inter-disciplinary field, and we welcome approaches that encourage dialogue across disciplines as well as within them. Postgraduate students researching humour-related topics are especially welcome to present their research-in-progress, and some postgraduate scholarships for fees will be available to assist their attendance. In no particular order, some relevant themes include:

• The limits of humour in the digital age
• Humour and the media
• When laughter isn’t the best medicine
• Humour and censorship
• Carnival and mischief
• Humour and free speech
• The boundaries of interpersonal and workplace humour
• Satire as humour
• Humour and blasphemy
• Schadenfreude
• Humour and power
• Physical comedy, slapstick and injury
• Humour and disability
• Humour, mockery and aggression
• Coulrophobia (fear of clowns)
• Humour and bigotry, derogatory humour
• ‘Dying’ on stage
• Bad taste humour
• Cultural and personal taboos on humour

To submit your proposal and for information on attending the conference,

please see: http://sydney.edu.au/humourstudies/events/index.shtml.

The Call will close on Friday 21 August 2015.

Organising Committee:

Dr Peter Kirkpatrick, Dept of English, University of Sydney (Convenor)

Dr Jessica Milner Davis, Dept of English, University of Sydney

Dr Will Visconti, FASS e-Learning, University of Sydney

23-26 July 2015, Australian Catholic University, Strathfield Campus, Sydney

Registrations are open for the Grounding the Sacred conference.

The conference brings writers, artists, musicians, academics, researchers, religious and members of the public together to discuss where creativity sits in relation to religion and the search for meaning. Invited speakers and performers include Imam Afroz Ali, Carmel Bird, Kathleen Deignan (Iona Spirituality Institute), Kevin Hart (Virginia), David Jasper (Glasgow), Vivien Johnson, Dr Rachael Kohn, Dr Genevieve Lacey, David Malouf, Michael McGirr, and Thaddeus Metz (Johannesburg). There will be a free post-graduate seminar on 23 July with Kevin Hart, Alison and David Jasper and Thaddeus Metz. In addition, some 60 conference papers will be presented. Registration is essential and is encouraged by 8 July 2015.

Please visit the conference website: http://www.acu.edu.au/groundingthesacred

A pdf flyer is available here: http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/static/new/files/newsitefiles/Grounding the Sacred through Literature and the Arts 2015.pdf

21-23 September 2015, University of Technology Sydney

When Australian author, Anne Summers wrote Damned Whores and God’s Police she never thought that 40 years later we would still be fighting to achieve women’s equality.

To celebrate the 40 years since the book’s release, from 21-23 September Anne will be hosting a 3-day conference to look at its impact, legacy and the future of women’s equality.

Speakers include prominent Australians, as well as international activists and women's rights campaigners such as former Governor General Quentin Bryce, Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, the fearless ‘fanny defender’ Nimco Ali, the former Head of the Australian Army Lieutenant General David Morrison and many more.

For further details and to register, please see the following link http://www.annesummers.com.au/conversations/damned-whores-and-gods-police-40-years-on-conference/

ASALvets have organised a tour of the Turkish coast and some Greek islands to culminate in the Half the Perfect World: literary expatriation and sociability conference on Hydra (27-28 September 2016). The tour will begin in Istanbul on the 9th September, taking in Gallipoli, Ephesus and Pergamon, and crossing to the Greek islands of Santorini, Naxos and Mykonos by boat. We will also visit Athens before arriving on Hydra for the conference. There are three places remaining, so if you are interested, please contact Susan Lever for more information susan.plever@bigpond.com.

ASALvets have organised a tour of the Turkish coast and some Greek islands to culminate in the Half the Perfect World: literary expatriation and sociability conference on Hydra (27-28 September 2016). The tour will begin in Istanbul on the 9th September, taking in Gallipoli, Ephesus and Pergamon, and crossing to the Greek islands of Santorini, Naxos and Mykonos by boat. We will also visit Athens before arriving on Hydra for the conference. Places on the tour are limited, so if you are interested, please contact Susan Lever for more information (susan.plever@bigpond.com)

A PDF is available here: http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/static/new/files/newsitefiles/Turkey Greece ASAL 2016 email.pdf

31 March–2 April 2016, University of Washington, Seattle

The American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS) invites paper proposals for its 2016 Annual Conference, to be held at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, 31 March –2 April 2016. Papers addressing any aspect of Australian, New Zealand, and South Pacific literary, film, and cultural studies are welcome. Papers on Aboriginal, Maori or other indigenous topics are especially encouraged. Proposals from graduate students are also encouraged. Presentations are 20 minutes long; however, alternate presentation formats can be submitted. Please send a paper title and 250-word proposal by 15 November 2015 to Brenda Machosky (machosky@hawaii.edu). Please label the email subject line: AAALS 2016 proposal.

29-31 March 2016, University of New South Wales, Sydney

This conference aims to explore the manifold intersections of modernist culture and the concept of “work”. Modernism emerged during a moment of rapid transformation in the conditions and meaning of labour. New jobs and professions proliferated with dizzying speed in the wake of the second industrial revolution, along with new techniques of “scientific management”. Under the influence of these and other changes, the kinds of work available to women changed markedly during the modernist period, while legal gender restrictions were abolished in a growing number of professions. At the same time, many strands of modernist culture involved a rethinking of the concept of “work” in literary and aesthetic domains, in often contradictory ways. Modernist writers and artists repeatedly interrogated the nature and function of an artistic career in an age of mass culture, and radical critiques of the notion of the art “work” itself—as organic, as self-contained, as a product of artistic skill—were launched from various sectors of the avant-garde. Numerous subsequent interventions in critical and aesthetic theory can be placed in the lineage of this initial modernist questioning of the work itself.

We are seeking papers on the relationship between modernism and work in any of its myriad configurations—formal, historical, empirical, theoretical, literal, metaphorical, textual, contextual, material and everything in between. We also welcome papers that test the boundaries of the concept of modernism itself, whether by extending its chronological scope, rethinking its traditional canon or questioning its privileged media.

Postgraduate travel bursaries: The Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia (UNSW) together with the Australasian Modernist Studies Network will offer a small number of bursaries of up to $500 each for Australian and international graduate students. Bursary applications will be invited following the acceptance of paper proposals.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Professor Christopher Nealon (Johns Hopkins University), Professor Morag Shiach (Queen Mary University of London).

Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers or panels of three papers examining any aspect of the conference theme. Proposals from postgraduate students are especially encouraged. Please send 300 word abstracts and a brief biographical note to j.attridge@unsw.edu.au by Thursday 1 October 2015.

The full cfp can be viewed and downloaded here: http://amsn.org.au/amsn-conferences/amsn3/. Registration and other information will be available through the AMSN website, at http://amsn.org.au/.

17- 19 April 2016, Caloundra

The conference program is now available. The program is available here: PROGRAM

A PDF of the registration form is available here: REGISTRATION FORM

Sunday 17 April

5.00-7.00

Welcome drinks and finger food, sponsored by the Queensland Review, at Dicky Beach Surf Club, 1A Coochin St., Dicky Beach.

Monday 18 April

Papers in the Osprey Room, Breakfree Grand Pacific Hotel, 100 Bulcock St., Caloundra.

9.00-10.30

Deborah Jordan, ‘Vance and Nettie Palmer in Caloundra: the regional turn’

Susan Lever, ‘From Vance Palmer’s The Passage to Susan Johnson’s The Landing’

10.30-11.00 Morning tea

11.00-12.30

Sue Sheridan, ‘Nancy Cato at Noosa’

Cheryl Taylor, ‘The Sunshine Coast Hinterland as Thea Astley’s Turning Point’

LUNCH

1.30-3.OO

Roger Osborne, ‘ “According to Noonan”: Jack McKinney in the Australian Journal.

Nina Gartrell, ‘Acts of “Imaginative Cartography”: multi-regional affiliations in Seeds: A Permaculture Travel Memoir’

DINNER: 6 pm. meet for drinks before conference dinner at Tides Waterfront Restaurant, cnr Esplanade and Minchinton St., Caloundra., at 6.30 pm.

Tuesday 19th April:

Papers at the Osprey Room, BGP Hotel.

9.00-10.30

Pat Buckridge, ‘Piecing it all together: literature in the Nambour Chronicle and North Coast Advertiser, 1920-1950’

Belinda McKay ‘Pineapples and lantana: Eleanor Dark’s Montville reflections on literature and capitalism’

COFFEE BREAK

10.45-11.00

Kay Ferres, ‘The sea will be there’

Conference wrap-up.

LUNCH

12.30–5.00

Coach tour to the Blackall Range (Glasshouse Mountains view, Maleny, the Darks’ house, Montville, Mapleton, Nambour, maybe even the Big Pineapple!).

29-31 March, UNSW

A reminder that "Early bird” registration for AMSN3: Modernist Work, an interdisciplinary conference taking place at UNSW on the 29-31 March, closes on Friday 26 February.

Confirmed keynote speakers are Professor Susan Best (Griffith University), Professor Christopher Nealon (Johns Hopkins University) and Professor Morag Shiach (Queen Mary University of London).

Consult the draft programme, and register for either a single day or the whole conference, via the links below:

http://amsn.org.au/amsn-conferences/amsn3/programme-2/

http://amsn.org.au/amsn-conferences/amsn3/registration-2/

Please direct any questions to John Attridge (j.attridge@unsw.edu.au).

27-29 September 2016, Monash University Prato Centre, Palazzo Vai, Prato, Italy

There has been enormous international scholarly interest in J.M Coetzee’s writings in recent years. Since 2010, four major international conferences (Sydney, Wuhan, Leeds and Adelaide) have been held and two literary biographies, nine monographs and over four hundred book chapters and journal articles have been published on his work. Despite this, very little has been written on what we are calling, as a deliberate provocation, ‘Coetzee’s women’: on his female narrators and characters; or on the women writers who have influenced him and have been compared with him. This three-day international conference asks preeminent and emerging scholars to bring their attention to bear on ‘Coetzee’s women’, broadly conceived, as well as possible reasons for the lack of sustained critical engagement with this theme until now. Possible paper topics include:

• Female ventriloquism
• Love, sex and desire
• Mothers and daughters
• The woman writer
• Female mentors and carers
• Violence against women
• Youth and aging
• Women and race
• Beauty
• Coetzee and Gordimer
• Women and power
• The female gaze
• Coetzee and Lessing
• Women’s silence and speech
• The male gaze
• Women and education
• Coetzee on women’s writing
• Women’s knowledge
• Feminist and queer readings of Coetzee’s writings

An intended outcome of this conference is an edited volume of scholarly essays. Abstracts of not more than 250 words and a 50-word bio are invited and should be sent to: artscoetzee@monash.edu by 1 April 2016.

This event is hosted by the Centre for Writers and Writing, Monash University and kindly supported by the Faculty of Arts. Confirmed Participants/Keynotes: Professor J.M. Coetzee (Adelaide), Professor Elleke Boehmer (Oxford) Professor Carrol Clarkson (Amsterdam), Professor David Attwell (York).

Convenors: Professor Sue Kossew (Monash) Dr Melinda Harvey (Monash).

Updates will be posted on the conference website:

http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/reading-coetzees-women/

All other enquiries should be directed to the organisers:

Professor Sue Kossew (sue.kossew@monash.edu)

Dr Melinda Harvey (melinda.harvey@monash.edu).

11-13 July 2016, Western Sydney University

We invite papers that engage with any aspect of literature and technology; explore the significance of digital technologies for teaching, reading, and research practice; analyze the relationship between literature and technology; and consider literature as a type of technology. We also invite papers that investigate literature which takes technology as its primary subject, either in terms of form and/or theme.

We welcome proposals of 250 words for individual papers or panels. Please include a 100 word biography with your abstract. Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

• Representations of technology in literature;
• Literature as technological process, including the transformation of genres;
• The technological history of the book, including print-technologies and ebooks;
• The relationship between technological change and the rise in literary modernism/postmodernism;
• The evolution of narrative forms from print to digital media;
• Hypertext fiction;
• The digitization of literary texts and archives;
• The impact of digital technologies on reading, teaching, and research practice;
• Online authorship, gender, and power;
• Technological utopias and dystopias in literature;
• The influence of past and present technologies (cinema, radio, print, hypertext, multimedia, etc.) on formal and thematic literary innovations;
• The role of the internet in the reception and transmission of new literary texts, including issues of accessibility and digital censorship;
• Theoretical and philosophical approaches to literature's relationship with technology.

Please send your proposals to: aal2016@westernsydney.edu.au

Deadline for submissions: 29 February 2016.

Please direct any queries to conference organisers:

Dr Anne Jamison (a.jamison@westernsydney.edu.au)

or Dr Matt McGuire (m.mcguire@westernsydney.edu.au)

For futher details please see the website:

https://www.uws.edu.au/writing_and_society/events/technology_and_literature_conference

6-9 July 2016, UNSW Canberra and the National Library of Australia

Capital-Empire-Print-Dissent will seek to articulate the ways in which the institutions of government, the arts, the universities and the heritage sectors have forged what we now call ‘Australian’ literature; and the relationship between, on the one hand, traditionalists, heritage-makers, administrators and purveyors of cultural inheritance and, on the other, the iconoclasts, dissenters, rebels, and activists equally drawn to centres of governmental, financial, cultural and intellectual power.

Capital-Empire-Print-Dissent assumes the ‘worlding’ of ‘Australian’ literature but looks for structured histories of its formation, not least in the interconnected pasts of Empire and indigenous belonging. More broadly it questions the directions of twenty-first-century ‘postcolonialism’ and explores the ongoing and shifting political relationships between metropolis and (former) empire, colonies and the nation, federations and the state, capitals and their hinterlands, nations and trade zones; and all of their discontents.

Offers for single 20 minute papers considering all aspects of ‘Australian’ literature broadly conceived are welcomed, and could address:

• The violence of silence and transported guilt: Enlightenment frontiers and industrial wars of settlement

• Myths of beginning and colonial federalism

• Antipodean nightmares and colonial utopia

• Transnational indigeneity, tent embassies and literary sovereignty

• Settler modernity and the racial state

• Garrisons of the Republic: The military, the monarchy and literary loyalty

• Documentalism, institutionalism and the bureaucratic literary

• Cultures of conflict, memorialism and (post)colonial war

• Dreams of domesticity and suburban belonging

• A bush capital and the global city: landscape and streetscape

• Global empire, migration and the placing of diversity

• Pigeons and possums: Animal inhabitation and urban ecoscapes

• Pulp places, urban pleasures and popular readerships

• Archives of nation-making and the memory of the memo

• City-sex and suburb-sex

• Metaphorical territories, penal colonies and off-shore incarceration

Proposals for panels of no more than three speakers with a nominated chair on a shared theme are also welcome.

Topical Masterclasses are proposed for the morning of 6 July on these two topics:

Transindigenous and comparative frames for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing:

Drawing on the expertise of Professor Chadwick Allen and multi-award winning writer Melissa Lucashenko, this workshop masterclass is open to scholars interested in discussing the ways in which indigenous literature connects beyond, within, through and against national state formations, with specific reference to local and community identified Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers.

Archiving the now: Drawing on the outstanding manuscript holdings in the UNSW Canberra Academy Library special collections, this workshop masterclass attends to the recent material past of contemporary Australian literature from the last thirty to forty years. How do we deal with records of literary production that feel immediate and are yet archival? Are there new ways to consider the biographical, historical and material registers of literary culture in both their paper and digital forms? Facilitators include Professor Lyn McCredden and special collections librarians.

Both masterclasses are open to all scholars, but preference will be given to postgraduate and early career researchers, including those without current institutional affiliations.

Please submit titles and 250 word abstracts for proposed papers by Friday 26 February, 2016 to Shirley Ramsay: s.ramsay@adfa.edu.au

A PDF is available here

7-9 December 2016, Victoria University in Footscray, Melbourne.

Hosted by Victoria University, the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA) Conference will be held in Melbourne, Australia. Its theme is ‘Love and the Word’ and our keynote speakers are Peter Cryle, Anne Freadman, and Kam Louie. Already we have received papers focused on: the semantics of ‘love’ (in various languages); erotics and desire; performance; politics and rhetoric; poetry; prose fiction; pedagogy and teaching; colonial and postcolonial modalities; religion and the sacred; technology; and philosophy. This second Call for Proposals is open-themed, meaning we shall welcome any proposals that offer insightful research.

The organisers welcome submissions for individual presentations of 20 minutes and panel sessions of 90 minutes. Please note: submissions are due by Friday, 1 July 2016. Submissions should include: name/s of author/s (including affiliations), title of presentation, an abstract of up to 200 words, and a biographical note of up to 50 words per author.

Please send to: aulla@aulla.com.au.

Please see the website for more information: www.aulla.com.au.

The 2017 ASAL conference, Looking In, Looking Out: China and Australia is in full preparation mode, and will be held in Melbourne, July 11-14, at the city campuses of Latrobe University, Melbourne University, Library at the Dock and the Wheeler Centre at the State Library. All sites are in the CBD and walkable from each other or accessible on the free City Circle Tram route. Booking accommodation in the CBD, or in inner suburbs such as Fitzroy, Carlton, Richmond or Footscray, on the train or tramlines, would be best.

We’ve had many responses to the call for papers and paper-givers will be notified in the next week. We’ve also had wonderful response from Chinese students and senior scholars, and are assembling a great list of participants. Keynote speakers include Professor Wang Labao, translator Professor Li Yao, inaugural Billiton Chair of Australian Studies at Renmin University Beijing, Professor David Walker, writer Alice Pung, and many others. Don’t miss out – we are developing the conference website and online registration system and will go live soon.

email ASAL2017@latrobe.edu.au to register your interest on our conference mailing list.

To update your membership please click here

11-14 July 2017, Melbourne

The 2017 ASAL conference will ask its presenters to continue to think about Australian literature at home and in the world following on from recent conferences highlighting the worlding of Australian literature, the centrality of indigenous literature, and the changing imperatives and pressures in the teaching of Australian literature in Australia and beyond. This conference asks contributors to look inwards and outwards: examining the continuing fascination with place, context and locality in the face of the global.

One of the highest concentrations of Australian Studies centres in the world is in China. This conference invites Chinese and Australian scholars of Australian literature to come together with other international scholars of Australian literature to examine the teaching and study of Australian literature in the context of this transnational interest.

Offers for single 20 minute papers considering any and all aspects of ‘Australian’ literature broadly conceived are welcomed. Conference themes include:

• Literature and landscape
• Cross cultural teaching
• Theorising diaspora
• Theorising transcultural literary production
• Teaching Australian literature in China/Australia/ the world
• Chinese Australian writing
• Children’s literature
• Translation of Australian children’s books in China
• The idea of place in Australian literature
• Translating Australian literature
• Literature in translation
• Reading Chinese literature in Australia
• Reception of Australian literature
• Studying literature in China and Australia –similarities and differences

Please submit the following to ASSC.Research@latrobe.edu.au with subject heading “ASAL Conference”:

1) Title of Paper

2) 250 word abstract

3) Name, position, organisation and brief biography (100 words maximum).

Extended deadline for abstracts: 28 February 2017

Extended deadline PDF available here

A PDF flyer is available here

The ASAL mini conference webpage is now live and can be accessed here: http://conference-desert-lines.cdu.edu.au/ 

The webpage includes a link to register for the conference by 1 February. A full / concession registration includes the keynote and masterclass on Thursday as well as the symposium on Friday. The conference dinner on Friday night is an additional cost but promises to be an enjoyable evening at Darwin's award-winning Char restaurant.

25 and 26 September, 2018, Hotel Bratsera, Hydra
 
Following on from the Half the Perfect World Conference held on Hydra in 2016, Writers, Dreamers, Drifters and the Aegean continues the exploration of post-war literary and artistic exchange centred on Greece and the Aegean.
 
Mainland Greece and the Aegean islands, sitting within the orbit of three continents and at the crucible of several civilisations and empires, have been at the centre of intellectual, cultural, commercial and migratory exchange for millennia. As the second half of the Twentieth Century dawned they struggled for relevancy. Despite enjoying some of the planet’s most enticing natural and cultural attractions and an enviable climate, they were also poor, underdeveloped and depleted by a decade of war and by generations of development that had driven populations to mainland cities. But what modernity had taken, it might yet give back, as post-war Europe looked to make the most of economic growth and expanding opportunities for leisure, travel and cultural tourism. For a generation of writers and artists the Aegean continued to serve as inspiration, respite, escape, or touchstone. This is the subject matter of Writers, Dreamers, Drifters and the Aegean.
 
Papers might focus on the international expatriates and visitors who are now associated with the region; including George Johnston, Charmian Clift; Sidney Nolan, Axel Jensen; Henry Miller, Gordon Merrick; Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, and Leonard Cohen. There are many others. Papers might also consider Greek writers and artists such as George Seferis, George Katsimbalis, and Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika. Again there are many others.

The conference also invites contributions on subjects in the context of the Aegean, such as twentieth century literary and artistic expatriation; cultural travel, and intellectual exchange. They could also relate new ideas about emergent tourist literature focused on the Aegean; consider post-war promotion of the Mediterranean and Aegean and the impact of mass-tourism; discuss the significance of islands in post-war Greek literary culture (and/or other literatures); or consider women’s contributions to the imagination and realisation of Greek island living.
 
While papers associated with Hydra are particularly relevant, we also welcome contributions that consider literary and artistic expatriation, cultural exchange and travel to mainland Greece and other Aegean islands or the wider Mediterranean.
 
Conference Convenors: Tanya Dalziell (University of Western Australia) and Paul Genoni (Curtin University)

Abstracts: 250 words, due by: 2 February, 2018

Address to: P.genoni@curtin.edu.au; and/or Tanya.dalziell@uwa.edu.au Please contact convenors with any queries about the suitability of topics etc.
Papers: 25 minutes, with 15 minutes for discussion.

This conference is supported by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia, and Curtin University

Website: Coming soon!
 

14-16 March 2019, UNSW

Website: https://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/events/featured/new-australian-modernities-2019-mini-conference/

 
This symposium works from the premise that a key Australian literary and aesthetic modernity begins at the mid-twentieth century with the arrival of refugees from the Displaced Persons camps of post-war Europe, and continues through the many subsequent waves of arrivals. It aims to provoke consideration of the wider significance of what were termed “New Australian” arrivals to the intellectual and cultural life of the nation from the mid-century, as an alternative reading of the Australian modernist project in terms of Sneja Gunew’s 1983 designation of migrant writing as a Derridean “dangerous supplement” to Australian literature.
 
Within this configuration of New Australian Modernities, the symposium invites contributors to examine the important work of Antigone Kefala. Kefala is a significant Australian author who has produced more than a dozen acclaimed works including novels, novellas and poetry. Her significance was acknowledged by the award in 2017 of the Judith Wright Calanthe Poetry Award for her most recent collection Fragments (Giramondo) in the Queensland Literary Awards. A collection of critical writing about her work over four decades was published in 2009 in Antigone Kefala: A Writers Journey(Owl Publishing). This collection brought the range and significance of Kefala’s work back into public view. A decade later, this symposium invites new consideration of Kefala’s work. Contributors are invited to approach her writing in terms of the history of writing by non-Anglo writers in Australia, and also in the context of the recent upsurge of interest in writers from diverse backgrounds. We also invite contributors to explore the milieus within which Kefala worked, and the networks of other artists and writers with whom she was connected.

Convenors: Brigitta Olubas and Elizabeth McMahon
Keynote Speaker: Sneja Gunew

Please send abstracts by 31 October 2018 to: Brigitta Olubas b.olubas@unsw.edu.au with the subject line: ASAL19KEFALA.
 

The upcoming ASAL conference on “New Australian Modernities” (March 15-16, with ASAL Patrons Lecture on March 14) will also feature an HDR/ECR/Honours masterclass run by Prof Sneja Gunew on the topic of “Ex-centric Australian Modernisms/Modernity”.

This is a wonderful opportunity for postgrads and ECRs to connect to each other and to work with an international leader in this field. All postgraduate students and ECRs are very welcome to attend.

Readings are available via a wiki site accessed after registration.

Further information: contact Brigitta Olubas b.olubas@unsw.edu.au

https://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/events/masterclass/

25 and 26 September, 2018, Hotel Bratsera, Hydra
 
Following on from the Half the Perfect World Conference held on Hydra in 2016, Writers, Dreamers, Drifters and the Aegean continues the exploration of post-war literary and artistic exchange centred on Greece and the Aegean.
 
Mainland Greece and the Aegean islands, sitting within the orbit of three continents and at the crucible of several civilisations and empires, have been at the centre of intellectual, cultural, commercial and migratory exchange for millennia. As the second half of the Twentieth Century dawned they struggled for relevancy. Despite enjoying some of the planet’s most enticing natural and cultural attractions and an enviable climate, they were also poor, underdeveloped and depleted by a decade of war and by generations of development that had driven populations to mainland cities. But what modernity had taken, it might yet give back, as post-war Europe looked to make the most of economic growth and expanding opportunities for leisure, travel and cultural tourism. For a generation of writers and artists the Aegean continued to serve as inspiration, respite, escape, or touchstone. This is the subject matter of Writers, Dreamers, Drifters and the Aegean.
 
Papers might focus on the international expatriates and visitors who are now associated with the region; including George Johnston, Charmian Clift; Sidney Nolan, Axel Jensen; Henry Miller, Gordon Merrick; Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, and Leonard Cohen. There are many others. Papers might also consider Greek writers and artists such as George Seferis, George Katsimbalis, and Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika. Again there are many others.

The conference also invites contributions on subjects in the context of the Aegean, such as twentieth century literary and artistic expatriation; cultural travel, and intellectual exchange. They could also relate new ideas about emergent tourist literature focused on the Aegean; consider post-war promotion of the Mediterranean and Aegean and the impact of mass-tourism; discuss the significance of islands in post-war Greek literary culture (and/or other literatures); or consider women’s contributions to the imagination and realisation of Greek island living.
 
While papers associated with Hydra are particularly relevant, we also welcome contributions that consider literary and artistic expatriation, cultural exchange and travel to mainland Greece and other Aegean islands or the wider Mediterranean.
 
Conference Convenors: Tanya Dalziell (University of Western Australia) and Paul Genoni (Curtin University)

Abstracts: 250 words, due by: February 16, 2018

Address to: P.genoni@curtin.edu.au; and/or Tanya.dalziell@uwa.edu.au 

Please contact convenors with any queries about the suitability of topics etc.
Papers: 25 minutes, with 15 minutes for discussion.