CFP: International Connections and Disconnections in 1950s Literature and Culture

Online symposium: February 19, 2027.

Keynote address: 'Witchcraft and the Domestic Occult in Postwar Women's Writing: From New Forest to Mexico City', with Dr. Anna Watz, associate professor in English literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. Dr. Watz is an expert on surrealist literature and art, and is the author of Angela Carter and Surrealism: ‘A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic’ (Routledge, 2016) and Surrealism and Feminine Difference (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2027). She is the editor of A History of the Surrealist Novel (Cambridge UP, 2023) and Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (Manchester UP, 2020). 

The long 1950s (c. 1945-67) was a period frequently marked by suspicion and hostility against foreign influence. In the US, this was the era of Cold-War paranoia, McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Elsewhere in the world, the US was the threat, and in the Soviet Union, those seen as overly influenced by Western culture became targets. In many different contexts, the foreign was construed as an ideological and an existential threat. At the same time, artists, writers, thinkers, film-makers, and politicians engaged in transnational exchanges and a circulation of ideas and knowledge that suggest that the long 1950s was far from an isolationist era. It was, in other words, a period of both connection and disconnection, in which doors both opened and closed.

For our fourth INNC symposium, we invite scholars, researchers, and enthusiasts to explore these connections and disconnections in 1950s literature and culture. This online symposium will investigate international and transnational exchanges in the long 1950s and we welcome interdisciplinary contributions that engage with any form of culture, literature, art, and film of the period.

We are looking for twenty-minute papers that engage with the theme of the symposium. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Transnational circulations of literary forms, genres, and aesthetic movements;

• The movement of texts across linguistic and cultural boundaries;

• International publishing networks and the global circulation of print culture;

• Cultural diplomacy, soft power, and the politics of artistic exchange;

• Encounters between East and West: mediation, misunderstanding, and mutual influence;

• The role of exhibitions, and international institutions in shaping cultural exchange;

• Transnational film cultures;

• Intellectual networks and the circulation of ideas;

• Exile, migration, and diaspora as conditions of cultural production;

• Cold-War reconfigurations of literary centers and peripheries;

• Decolonization and transnational solidarities;

• Censorship, surveillance, and the regulation of cross-border cultural flows;

• The relationship between national identity and international influence;

• Circulations of science, technology, and knowledge as cultural exchange;

• Gender and transnational exchange: women’s networks, mobility, and representation;

• Race, empire, and the global circulation of cultural forms;

• The material conditions of exchange: travel, communication technologies, and media infrastructures

Please submit your abstracts by November 2 to: annika.lindskog@englund.lu.se. 

 Conference Organizers:

Annika J. Lindskog, Lund University

Sanna Melin Schyllert, University of York