The North American British Music Studies Association
North American British Music Studies Association Biennial Conference 2016: Call for Proposals
The North American British Music Studies Association will hold its Seventh Biennial Conference from Thursday through Sunday, 4-7 August 2016, in Syracuse, New York, hosted by Syracuse University. Proposals on topics related to all aspects of British music and musical life throughout Britain, the Empire/Commonwealth, and beyond are welcome. Syracuse University is home to the Department of Art and Music Histories, one of the oldest in the country dedicated to the study of the arts in an interdisciplinary context, and to the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, one of the nation’s top communications schools. Thus, the program committee particularly encourages submissions that draw upon interdisciplinary or broader cultural contexts or that engage with media aspects or studies.
Presentations may take a variety of formats, including individual papers of twenty minutes in length, workshops involving group participation, roundtable discussions, lecture-recitals, and themed panel sessions. The Nicholas Temperley Prize will be awarded for the best scholarly presentation given by a graduate student.
A new addition to the program this year will be a colloquium, featuring a group of senior scholars invited to participate by the NABMSA executive board, who will address a topic that cuts across chronological, methodological, and geographical divisions within the discipline.
Proposal format and content
- For individual papers, abstracts of around 350 words should clearly present the title, the subject, the methodology, the argument, and the significance of the findings.
- For presentations in other formats, proposals should be of similar length, and should clearly state and justify the intended format, including amount of time requested, and should indicate the originality and significance of the material to be delivered.
- For those proposing a session of papers, individual papers should follow the guidelines above, and should be accompanied by a rationale of around 350 words that addresses the topic of the session and the relationships between the papers to be presented.
- Anyone proposing a lecture-recital should attach a short biography and must also include recordings of the proposed performer(s) playing examples of the proposed repertory if not of the exact proposed work(s).
- All proposals should also indicate audio-visual needs (in a separate line at the end of the abstract).
- Students should identify themselves as such, so that their papers can be considered for the Temperley Prize.
Proposal transmission procedures
- Proposals should be sent via e-mail attachment to the Program Committee Chair Christopher Scheer (christopher.scheer@usu.edu) with the subject-line NABMSA 2016 Proposal.
- The proposal should be attached to the e-mail and in Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx, or .rtf), only. Other formats such as .pdf will not be accepted.
- In addition to paper title and abstract, the Word document should contain:
- Your name
- Your address
- Your telephone, fax, and preferred e-mail address
- Your preferred affiliation or city
- Your audio-visual requirements
- Audio or video recordings supporting proposals for lecture-recitals are required (demo disc, .mp3 files, etc.) and should be received (electronically) by the same deadline as the abstract (see below). Please contact the Program Chair via email for instructions on how to transmit these materials electronically. Do not send them as email attachments.
- The deadline for all submissions is midnight, Eastern Standard Time, on Friday 22 January 2016.
More information about NABMSA and its activities may be seen on the Association’s web site, http://nabmsa.org/conferences/2016-biennial-conference/
Submissions will be acknowledged within four days of receipt. Participants will be notified of the acceptance by mid-March 2016. Program Committee for 2016: Christopher M. Scheer (Utah State University), chair; Linda Austern (Northwestern University); Lisa Colton (University of Huddersfield); Ryan Ross (Mississippi State University); and the President of the Society (ex-officio).
Thirteenth Annual Plenary Conference of the Society for Musicology in Ireland
University College Cork
12–14 June 2015
[DEADLINE: 31 March 2015]
Musicology in Progress…
Keynote address: Nicholas Cook (1684 Professor of Music, University of Cambridge), “The imaginary African: music, identity, and race”
In this conference, we come together to share our current research, our personal musicologies in progress. We also seek opportunities to reflect, in and around the programme, on the state of musicological enquiry more generally. Musicology is itself a work in progress, with recent discoveries heaped ever higher upon the ground bass of its enduring concerns, with the expanded timbres offered by new materials and approaches, and with the heady call-and-response of habitual practice vs. emergent subjectivities. In all this we’re meanwhile surrounded by others—inside and beyond the academy—who are every bit as actively taking up the challenge of explaining music as a vital facet of human experience. And as scholars we’re increasingly challenged to demonstrate how our work makes an impact in the wider world. So, we wish to discuss together how musicology leads to or springs from action that improves the human situation. What is our progress in that respect? We invite participants to consider submitting proposals that touch upon the notion of musicology in progress, and to take this opportunity to reflect on where we are now and where our next steps might take us.
Proposals are now welcome for papers (20 minutes’ duration) and panels (60/ 90 minutes) addressing any area, field or theme of musicology—broadly defined. Proposals may be submitted to smi2015cork@gmail.com (closing date: Tuesday 31 March 2015). Each proposal should contain:
• (each) speaker’s name, title, affiliation (where applicable) and contact email;
• an abstract summarising the paper or panel. Abstracts for individual papers should be c. 250 words in length; those for panels should be of similar proportion for each speaker;
• the proposal can be submitted in doc, docx or rtf format;
• we welcome proposals for research presentations that adopt other formats, including posters, performances, sound art, digital interventions, roundtables or films; abstracts for these should be similar in length to those already discussed.
Currently, we anticipate announcing the draft programme on Tuesday 28 April. If you need proof of earlier acceptance for visa or grant-related reasons, be sure to note that in your accompanying email.
Registration is now open at http://www.uccconferencing.ie/product/2015-annual-conference-society-musicology-ireland-june-12-june-14-2015/, with reduced rates for SMI members. Meanwhile, SMI membership can be taken out or renewed at http://www.musicologyireland.com/. A small number of free registrations are available to research students willing to work for up to 6 hours as conference assistant: contact smi2015cork@gmail.com (by 31 March 2015) for further information.
CFP: Facing the Music of Medieval England. Study Day: University of Huddersfield. Saturday 21 – Sunday 22 March 2015
Recent work on medieval England and its music has focused on a wide range of issues, from editing fragmentary sources, to the consideration of historiographical questions. The publication of facsimiles and editions of medieval English music has made this repertoire significantly more readily available than a decade ago, yet discussions of the music of the period (its language, form, genres, style, textuo-musical relationships, and broader questions of meaning) remain underexplored. Facing the Music of Medieval England invites participants to engage with the musical repertoire as composed, cultivated and disseminated in England before c.1500. A keynote lecture, by Dr Margaret Bent, will be complemented by paper sessions that focus on thirteenth-, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century music from a variety of analytical standpoints. A session focused on reconstructing medieval English music will also allow discussion of the notion of musical text, notations, source transmission and style. The close focus on musical texts, editions, and issues such as reconstruction will benefit from the provision of interactive materials available to participants on iPads, to be provided to participants for use in sessions, fully networked and pre-loaded with relevant musical software, web resources and conference materials. A publication opportunity is available for selected contributions, which will form a special issue of the journal Early Music, subject to the standard peer review process. The organisers wish to extend a particular invitation to current research students, early career scholars, and independent scholars. The registration fee will be kept to a minimum to encourage wide participation from all sectors of the scholarly community, and is expected to be no more than £15.
Titles and abstracts for 20-minute papers to l.m.colton@hud.ac.uk by 10 January 2015.
Conference organisers: Dr Lisa Colton & Dr James Cook
Victorians in the World
North American Victorian Studies Association 2015 Annual Conference
July 9-12, 2015
Honolulu, Hawaii
Deadline: December 1, 2014
NAVSA was established in 2002 to provide a continental forum for discussion of critical issues in the Victorian period, and to encourage a wide variety of critical and disciplinary approaches to the study of the field. NAVSA sponsors an annual conference to provide a forum for presentation and discussion of research in Victorian studies. Earlier conferences have been held in Pasadena, CA, Venice, IT, and Madison, WI.
Plenary speakers include Vanessa Smith of the University of Sydney, and Jonathan Osorio of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The organizing committee for the 2015 NAVSA Annual Conference invites proposals for papers, panels, and special sessions on the subject of Victorians in the World.
Conference threads might include (but are certainly not limited to):
- Victorian Travel Writing
- Britain and America: the Special Relationship
- South Asians in England
- The Grotesque: Exquisite Bodies on Display
- “Going Native”: Victorians in the Caribbean
- Emigration
- Victorian Worldviews
- The Scottish Diaspora
- Absent-Minded Imperialists
- The foreign correspondents
- The Victorians and the World’s Fairs
- Architectural Imperialism
- French maids and English nannies
- Ibsen and the London theatre
- The world in the Victorian school
- Oceania in the Victorian Imagination
- Marketing Scotland to the World
- Dickens around the world
Deadline for paper and panel proposals is December 1, 2014; proposals for individual papers consist of a one-page (250-500 word) summary of the paper plus a one-page abbreviated cv. For panels, a paragraph describing the panel, plus a one page summary for each paper and a one page abbreviated cv for each participant is required.
CFP
Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck
Birkbeck College, University of London
July 16-18, 2015
Deadline: January 9, 2015
“The Arts and Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture”
“She saw no, not saw, but felt through and through a picture; she bestowed upon it all the warmth and richness of a woman’s sympathy; not by any intellectual effort, but by this strength of heart, and this guiding light of sympathy…” (Nathaniel Hawthorne,The Marble Faun, 1860)
This conference will explore the ways in which nineteenth-century authors, artists, sculptors, musicians and composers imagined and represented emotion and how writers and critics conceptualised the emotional aspects of aesthetic response. How did Victorian artists represent feeling and how were these feelings aestheticised? What rhetorical strategies did Victorian writers use to figure aesthetic response? What expressive codes and conventions were familiar to the Victorians? Which nineteenth-century scientific developments affected artistic production and what impact did these have on affective reactions?
The conference will consider the historically specific ways in which feeling is discussed in aesthetic discourse. It will also, however, encourage reflection about the limits of an historicist approach for understanding the emotions at play in nineteenth-century aesthetic response and the possibility of alternative methodologies for understanding the relation between feeling and the arts.
Proposals of up to 400 words should be sent to Dr. Vicky Mills at artsandfeeling@gmail.com by 9 January 2015. Please also attach a brief biographical note. Proposals for panels of three papers are also welcome, and should be accompanied by a brief (one-page) panel justification.
Possible topics might include:
- Languages of emotion (affect; feeling; sympathy; empathy; sentimentality)
- Theories of feeling (psychologists; art critics; philosophers; authors)
- The arousal of specific emotions (pain; joy; anger; grief; tenderness; anxiety; disgust) and the aestheticisation of the emotions
- The physiology and psychology of aesthetic perception (Physiological aesthetics; empathy; the nervous system; head v. heart)
- The arts and religious feeling (biblical painting; sacred music)
- Artists, museum visitors and concert-goers in fiction
- The gendering of aesthetic response
- The codification of artistic expression
- Museum Feelings (boredom; fatigue; the museum as a site of affect; the regulation of feeling)
- Curating feeling
- The ‘art of feeling’ (how to feel the right thing in response to music, art, sculpture)
- Feeling and touch
- The role of emotion in ekphrasis; translating feeling
The conference is organized by The Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.