Call for Papers

British Bodies
April 4 â€" 5, 2008
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The British Modernities Group, in conjunction with the UIUC Unit for
Criticism and Interpretative Theory and the Illinois Program for Research
in the Humanities, invites submissions from diverse disciplines for our
annual graduate student conference, this year themed “British Bodies.”

The body has become an innovative cornerstone of new trends in critical
theory, literary and film scholarship, and historiography. This “corporeal
turn” has taken multiple forms: from cognitive theory, to affect theory,
to the foregrounding of bodies in gender/sexuality and race studies and in
colonial history. These trends testify to a marked turn from conventional
deconstruction towards new forms of materialism. Theorists have become less
invested in the abstract Panopticon and more engaged with Foucault’s late
interest in biopower, a concept that deeply informs, for example, recent
theories of sovereignty, including Hardt and Negri’s “Empire” and Agamben’s
“bare life.” This graduate conference will engage this trend by
considering variously how bodies or materiality figure in the context of
British literature and culture from the 18th century through today.

Possible topics for consideration include but are not limited to:

--figurations of the literary work or other artwork as a body
--violence
--sensuality or materiality and aesthetics
--embodied identities (gender, sexuality, race, etc.) and nationalism,
regionalism, or imperialism
--bio-power and the colonial/imperial project
--new technologies and the body
--industrialism and class
--scientific/medical penetrations or theorizations of the body
--affect and the reception of the art object
--leisure or sports and culture
--modes of fashion and the body

This plenary-style conference is designed to facilitate dialogue between
panels, participants, and attendees. To that end, panelists are strongly
encouraged to attend the full conference, scheduled late Friday and all day
Saturday. Presenters will be expected to submit their papers to their
panel’s faculty respondent by March 22.

This year’s keynote speaker, Sarah Cole, is associate professor of English
and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her recent publications
include Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge
2003), “Homoerotic Heroics, Domestic Discipline: Conrad and Ford’s Romance”
(in Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature,
Minnesota, 2003), and “Nationalism and Modernism” (Modern Fiction Studies
2002). She is currently working on a project that investigates the
interrelations between violence and art in the modernist period.

Please send 300-word abstracts for individual 15-minute papers to
modernities_at_gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is Friday, February 8,
2008. Accepted applicants will be notified by February 18, 2008. In the
body of the e-mail, please include the following information: name,
university and departmental affiliation(s), level of graduate study, and
title of paper.

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Received on Wed Dec 05 2007 - 00:48:51 EST