travel writing

This panel examines travel and emplacement in response to crises. Interruptions to normative modes of travel in the ongoing wake of COVID-19 reveal fault-lines in the ways such norms are understood--how travel bans and exclusionary rhetoric extend national borders inward and outward, from the targeting of racialized international students, to the upheaval of the global passport rankings, to travel advisories crossing settler-state and tribal boundaries. Recent approaches to travel writing, mobility, and place studies have emphasized dwelling, emplacement, and urban exploration as a way of engaging with the seeming shifts in discussion towards travel within rather than across space.

The mid-twentieth century saw seismic shifts for British women, including those living under British rule in the colonies, in the public and private spheres. These years are often imagined as a wave of expansion and constriction, with the swelling of economic and political freedoms for women in the 1930s, the cresting of women in the public sphere during the Second World War, and the resulting break as employment and political opportunities for women dwindled in the 1950s when men returned home from the Front. But this narrative needs reexamining.

Online conference: 7 December 2020

Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden

Keynote Speakers: Professor Anne D. Wallace (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and Professor Jon Hegglund (Washington State University)

Organisers: Dr Lucy Jeffery & Professor Vicky Angelaki

In the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak, a common practice for many western media was to revisit an old orientalist habit to equate eastern culinary customs to primitiveness, eagerly reporting on Chinese “omnivorous markets” and “culinary adventurism” as a likely cause of the pandemic. Western disdain for extremely omnivorous eastern eating habits is not new to medievalists, nor is it a distinctively modern phenomenon. Such disdain for “oriental” eating habits focuses on the purportedly unclean, unethical, underdeveloped ways of eating everything, including whatever is tabooed for a Latin Christian to eat.

NEMLA Convention

Philadelphia, PA, March 11-14, 2021

Panel on French literature

Developing a discussion initiated in the recently-published Literary Geographies 6(1), the journal’s editors seek contributions to an expanded ‘Thinking Space’ section on ‘Literary Geographies in Isolation’ planned for the December issue. We are interested in receiving shorter submissions of 1500-3000 words, including the more personal, polemical or impressionistic. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• armchair tourism in lockdown

• reading as virtual fieldwork

This panel seeks to investigate cross-cultural and intercultural exchanges in British literature produced by men and women who traveled to and from the Americas (North, Central, and South) during the long 19th century (1750-1900). It provides a critical examination of the ideological underpinnings and socio-political reasoning for the production of British travel narratives as well as the effects they had on the construction of identity, race, and gender in American and British territories during this period. In doing so, we hope to challenge established academic disciplinary boundaries and provide new insights into the intricate relationships between transatlantic literature, identity, and politics.

The Leon Edel Prize is awarded annually for the best essay on Henry James by a beginning scholar. The prize carries with it an award of $300, and the prize-winning essay will be published in HJR.

The competition is open to applicants who have not held a full-time academic appointment for more than four years. Independent scholars and graduate students are encouraged to apply.

Essays should be 20-30 pages (including notes), original, and not under submission elsewhere or previously published.

Send submissions to: hjamesr@creighton.edu

Author's name should not appear on the manuscript.

Published at the height of the imperial enterprise, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has a long and intricate backstory. It is, in fact, the result of centuries of British discovery of and disappointment with the world. One by one, naturalists, amateur anthropologists, merchants, soldiers, diplomats or missionaries from the British Isles discovered the world for the armchair travelers at home and built up their self-esteem by disfiguring countries and regions in writings, paintings, and lectures at the Royal Geographical Society.

We are seeking one or two chapters to fill out our edited collection Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace (already under contract with Routledge). Ideally the chapter(s) would provide a case study that addresses some intersection of economy (market, exchange) and religion (faith, sprituality) in medieval and/or early modern Africa. How did matters of faith enter the marketplace in a specific region of Africa? How did religion facilitate or provide resistance to the growing slave trade? How did religions adapt to changing markets? 

Please send inquiries and/or abstracts to Scott Oldenburg (soldenbu@tulane.edu)

CALL FOR PAPERS for Edited Volume with ISBN.

Native Voices from India: A Reminiscence

The travel memoir offers an opportunity to examine a number of issues in terms of creative non-fiction. Travel stories focus on individuals who become strangers to themselves when they exile themselves from the environmental and cultural factors that have defined them thus far in service of self-discovery. They link up with the grand Odysseus-like impulse of traditional and modern literature that can profoundly alter identity when they travel and write about their experiences. Topics to consider would include a discussion of three particular aspects of this kind of storytelling. First, we must discuss the idea of fiction vs. fact and try to decide how much of each is essential in terms of crafting biographical material.

"Narratives of Displacement" International Conference

6 November 2020 - Palma, Spain

organised by

London Centre for Interdisciplinary ResearchThe British and Comparative Cultural Studies Research Group (BRICCS), Unversity of the Balearic Islands, Spain

in collaboration with

Research Project RTI2018-097186-B-I00 and RED2018-102678-T (MCI/AEI/ERDF, EU)

What is the place of unwilling travel(er)s in travel studies? What are the costs of travel? This roundtable considers travels that are not undertaken strictly by choice. We welcome proposals from any field or period on topics such as: climate-related relocations, internal/political migrants, self-liberation from slavery or captivity, literal/figurative boundaries, eco/animal movements, borderlands/crossings, economic exigencies that require travel, narratives of new beginnings.