A donde Neptuno reina: Water, Gods and the Iconography of Early Modern Power (16th–18th Centuries)
CHAM Conference—Oceans and Shores: Heritage, People, and Environments
Lisbon
12–15 July 2017

Since Antiquity, the personification of water—rivers or seas—has been a recurrent elements in the iconography related to power. From the Tigris to the Ganges, from the Mare Nostrum to the Atlantic Sea, water seems to have been an essential element in the visual display of powerful monarchies and empires. After the European discovery of the Americas, oceans started also to play an extraordinary role in allegorical representations, especially in Spain and Portugal, though elsewhere, too. This panel approaches water iconography, especially as related to oceans, as a mode of representation of power during the early modern period, addressing its role in politics and culture. We are interested in arts, music, and literature, and how they relate to the iconography of water and its relationship with power. Especially welcome are cross-disciplinary contributions, proposals that address different cases studies in a comparative way, and studies focused on ephemeral architecture and theatrical contexts. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Ephemeral art: Celebrations of victories, kings’ birthdays, or even religious events were the perfect context for the representation of water as the image of rulers.
• Prints, emblems, and propaganda: How does the topic relate to rulers’ propaganda?
• European powers and the new geography: How did sovereigns employ discoveries into their own images of power?
• Odes, poetry, and epic: How did literature use the image of oceans and rivers to glorify rulers, and what were the implications for the visual arts?

More information is available at the CHAM conference website, and please direct any questions to Dr. Pilar Diez del Corral Corredoira, diezdelcorralcorredoira@tu-berlin.de. Proposals are due by 1 February, 2017.

The Literary Interface
2018 Literary Studies Convention
Australian National University, Canberra
July 4-7, 2018

An interface describes a surface or plane that lies between or joins two points in space, but it also refers to ‘a means or place of interaction between two systems’ and ‘an apparatus designed to connect two scientific instruments so that they can be operated jointly’ (OED).

This convention will bring together scholars working across the broad field of literary studies to discuss the literary as an interface between different forms of knowledge and processes of knowledge formation, looking at questions of how and through what means the literary is communicated, represented, negotiated, and remade. By placing the concept of the literary centre-stage while at the same time interrogating its role as an interface, we wish to open up for discussion questions about the role, dynamism, and value of the literary in a time of institutional change and ongoing disciplinary formation. We would also like to debate the role of the literary text – and literary studies as a discipline – as a site of encounter between diverse languages and potentially alien modes of reading and writing.

Invoking the possibility of melding, soldering, and/or merging different elements, the literary interface suggests the resilience as well as the suppleness of disciplinary boundaries. It conjures the possibility of new meeting points; zones of contact and interaction but also sites of contention and disruption that might challenge received platitudes yet help us to bring to the surface new meanings.

Confirmed keynotes include Rey Chow and Lauren Goodlad.

We invite papers and panel proposals, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Mediation, remediation, and transmediation
• Literary Formalism – its past, present and/or future
• Multimedia forms as interfaces
• The relationship between forms, networks, and hierarchies
• Encounters between readers and modes of reading
• Translation
• The relationship between literary studies and other disciplines, e.g., environmental studies, maths, ethnography, science
• The interface between academic and public critical cultures
• Spaces of reading (online and otherwise)
• The negotiation of literary value
• The classroom as literary interface
• Literary objects as interfaces: circulation, reception, paratexts
• The stage and other spaces of performance as interface between temporalities, bodies, performers, writers and audiences
• Cultural interfaces
• Languages of colonialists/postcoloniality
• Transnationalism and minor transnationalism.

Please send abstracts of 150 words and biographical note of 100 words to: julieanne.lamond@anu.edu.au. Submissions due 1 July, 2017.

For further information please contact the Conference Convenor, Dr Julieanne Lamond. E: julieanne.lamond@anu.edu.au; Tel: +61 2 6125 4786