Culture and Conflict

“In the struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the basic theme of internal cultural development in historical societies, innovation always wins. But cultural innovation is generated by nothing other than the total historical movement—a movement which, in becoming conscious of itself as a whole, tends to go beyond its own cultural presuppositions and toward the suppression of all separations.”

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

The Linda Hall Library is now accepting applications for its 2024-25 fellowship program. These fellowships provide graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and independent scholars in the history of science and related humanities fields with financial support to explore the Library’s outstanding science and engineering collections. Fellows also participate in a dynamic intellectual community alongside in-house experts and scholars from other Kansas City cultural and educational institutions.

“The Gothic Imagination of Walt Disney Studios: Fear, Horror and the Uncanny in the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’.”

Editors A/Prof Allison Craven (James Cook University, Australia) and Dr Diana Sandars (University of Melbourne)

Named Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ and Spotify’s ‘Artist of 2023,’ Taylor Swift has dominated the music scene with re-recordings, a global tour and billions of streams. Singer, songwriter, performer and film director, Swift has excelled across genres, categories and artistic mediums. Bringing together academics, students and ‘Swifties,’ this conference will consider Taylor Swift as a major feminist voice and performer in the 21st century. Coinciding with the European leg of ‘The Eras Tour,’ the conference will offer a space to explore Swift’s feminist Reputation.

Topics under consideration might explore (but are not limited to): 

Calling All Rhetoricians! 

For the 14th Annual Midwest Winter Workshop 

The University of Wisconsin-Madison departments of Communication Arts and English, in coordination with our RSA student chapter, are thrilled to be hosting the 14th annual Midwest Winter Workshop on February 17, 2024. We cordially invite graduate students interested in any rhetoric, rhetoric-adjacent, or rhetoric-ish topics to participate! 

CFP: THE FUTURE OF MASCULINITIES: THEORY & PRAXIS
Deadline for proposals: February 10, 2024

For this seminar as part of the ESSE conference 2024 in Lausanne, 26-30 August 2024, we invite abstracts on the topic/narrative structures/media conditions of the scandalous (in the 19th-21st centuries) through the lens of  in_visibilisation. Scandals – in the context of sex, money or power – tend to involve obfuscation, an audience that is in the dark, but willing to see, agents who have an interest either in disclosure or in concealment. These interests are shot through with power that can be gendered, often contains a class-imbalance, is sometimes racialized, and not infrequently centres on non-normative desires. One area in which these dynamics of scandalization become particularly obvious are the cultural practices of fame and celebrity.

Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada
2024 Biennial Conference: Migrations

19-22 June, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario

The strings accentuating Norman Bates's stabbing of Marion Crane in Psycho (1960); the simple, albeit extremely effective two-note ostinato representing the shark in Jaws (1975); the sinister atmosphere established by Ennio Morricone's The Thing (1982) theme; the critique of pop music to the (diegetic) tune of Huey Lewis & The News' song "Hip To Be Square" in American Psycho (2000); the poignant use of Lynyrd Skynyrd's song "Free Bird" in the concluding scene of The Devil's Rejects (2005); the pieces of classical music accompanying Hannibal Lecter's preparation of dishes containing human ingredients in Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015); sounds of chainsaws cutting off human limbs, alligator jaws snapping h

There’s Jove’s “mythy mind” in “Sunday Morning,” Penelope’s meditative compositions in “The World as Meditation,” “Aeneas” bearing his father “from / The ruins of the past” in the uncollected “Tradition,” and a call-out to “Classical mythology” in general as “The greatest piece of fiction” toward the end of Adagia. Stevens invokes “Plato’s ghost” and “Aristotle’s skeleton” in “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit”; he proposes and describes a “platonic person” in “The Pure Good of Theory”; he points to Plato and cites Socrates throughout his essays and letters. We find him freely, knowingly referring to Callimachus, Democritus, Parmenides, Sappho, Xenophon; to Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid.

CONCEPT NOTE

Jerome Charyn Anthology

Jerome Charyn is one of America’s most prolific and respected authors. He has written 50-plus works of fiction, nonfiction, essay collections, memoirs, and more. Charyn is widely celebrated in Europe (particularly France and Germany), including renown for writing award-winning graphic novels. Included in his oeuvre is the Isaac Sidel crime novels, which added a new dimension to the genre, and his recent historical fiction: Savage & Son, Big Red, Sergeant Salinger, and Cesare. 

Our book, Digital Literacy at the Intersection of Equity, Inclusion, and Technology, aims to address a national and global need for furthering a deeper understanding of the complex relationships between equity, inclusion, and digital technologies in higher education. These issues impact students and faculty across disciplines, thus we aim to foster broader multidisciplinary conversations that will guide teacher-scholars as they navigate this rapidly evolving landscape. ObjectiveThis edited collection explores scholarship at the intersection of equity/inclusion and digital pedagogies.

Glossator 13: In a Sea of Commentary

“Abyssus abyssum invocat” (Psalm 42)

Initial H: Fishing in the margins. Moses Striking Water from the Rock and Israelites Drawing Water in the Abbey Bible, Italian (probably Bologna), about 1250-1262. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 107.62