Doctoral Symposium - Interregnum: Delving into the possibilities of the in-between
Further details about the call for abstracts and the respective deadlines can be found at this link.
Please submit your abstract (max 300 words) and a short bio (max 100 words) via e-mail to interregnum@unive.it by 31st October 2024 (23.59 CET).
We kindly ask you to submit your abstract and bio only in .pdf format.
The abstracts will be evaluated, and the conference programme will be finalized by a committee of PhD candidates from the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
- Notification of acceptance: by 16th December 2024
- Presence confirmation: by 20th January 2025
Call for papers: Association for Modern Japanese Literary Studies, 2025 spring conference
AMJLS is pleased to announce that its 2025 Spring meeting will be held as an international conference, to promote collaborative research activities between domestic and overseas scholars on modern and contemporary Japanese literature. This will be an excellent opportunity to organize panels and exchange ideas. The conference will be held on May 31 (Sat) and June 1 (Sun) in a fully online format using Zoom.
If you wish to participate, please apply via the guidelines available at the following link: https://amjls.jp/archives/2223
The deadline for submissions is December 14, 2024.
We look forward to receiving your applications!
Arcadia CfP: Multispecies Intellectual History
Call for Papers
Collection: Multispecies Intellectual History
Deadline: 31 January 2025
Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
Curated by Eiko Honda, Global Studies, Aarhus University.
Visit here for further details.
The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and Eiko Honda (Aarhus University) call for papers under the theme of ‘Multispecies Intellectual History,’ to be published in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History. The CfP aims to create the new thematic collection of featured articles within the journal on events in environmental history understood through a multispecies intellectual history perspective.
While the turn towards the more-than-human has been a strong presence in disciplines like geography, anthropology, and literary studies for close to a decade, it has received little recognition by intellectual historians with a few, notable exceptions. In this light, the new field of multispecies intellectual history (MIH), proposed by the project Unearthing Multispecies Intellectual History, challenges the foundation of “intellectual” history. That is, the assumed superiority of the autonomous human mind and its ability to reason on its own.
MIH emerges in a post-European Enlightenment paradigm where historical ideas and thought acknowledge their corresponding influences from realms beyond society and reasoning; here, they open their embrace to emotion, sensations, physical matters, and nonhuman actors. While doing so, MIH discerns epistemologies that surface out of encounters among plural ontologies, cosmologies, and historicities of heterogenous cultures and natures across time and space beyond the modern West. This collection therefore actively pays attention to cases in various regions of the world at the crossroad of area studies—with understanding of local languages—and the environmental humanities. The diversity of environments, people, and organisms call for a diverse MIH. The importance of MIH follows from the epistemic injustices inherent to intellectual history’s own history. In the present context of planetary crisis and ecological collapse, we are faced with a heightened urgency to situate our historical inquiries in a decolonial commitment to pluralism. This means recognizing other ways of defining and understanding the human and the nonhuman, and deconstructing or widening what is defined as intellectual per se.
The multispecies intellectual history and its methodology is not yet singularly defined and fixed. It would be a field whose methodologies could morph and diverge much like how Shuvatri Dasgupta has discussed the potentiality of a “nonhuman intellectual history.”[1] As Donna Haraway reminds us, “we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.”[2] This Arcadia collection of multispecies intellectual history opens the space of possibilities for uncovering such (hi)stories. Such a multispecies entanglement destabilizes the illusion of a dichotomized separation and hierarchies between humans and nonhumans. It recognizes the role of the nonhuman in different ways of understanding the world.
To do so, we may experiment with established and new methodologies to unearth, analyze, and theorize the epistemological process behind an “environmental” event situated in a specific historical context.
Call for Papers: Japanese theoretical models and concepts (Asian Studies, Swiss Asian Society)
Symposium: “Japan” in Communist Europe (March 1&2, 2025 @Tokyo University of Foreign Studies& online)
“Japan” in Communist Europe
The political separation imposed by the Soviet occupation of Eastern and Central Europe after World War II was not sufficient to contain the fascination for and keen interest in Japan and its literature and arts that were already present during the prewar period. In fact, the “Iron Curtain” either initiated new engagements or further enhanced existing ones. Moreover, despite a decade of diminished interactions until the end of the Stalinist period in the mid 1950s, Japan, its culture, arts, and literature came to represent in that geopolitical space artificially defined by the “Iron Curtain” not only an “exotic other”—the prevalent prewar perception—but also, paradoxically, a symbol of freedom, a societal model, and, as such, an aspiration.
The current symposium is a continuation of the two-day workshop “Japan: Literary and Cultural Representations in Communist Europe,” held online in October 2022; a selection of the papers presented in 2022 are included in the forthcoming volume Japan behind the Iron Curtain.
We hereby invite further contributions about the public perception and scholarly reception of Japan through translations of its literature, interpretations of its culture, and artistic endeavors engaging with “Japan” within the temporal frame and geopolitical confines of the countries that were either occupied by or left under the influence of the Soviet Union after World War II. Based on the contributions presented at the symposium we plan to put together a second Japan behind the Iron Curtain volume.
Those interested are invited to send their proposals to irinaholca@tufs.ac.jp by December 7, 2024. Selection results will be announced on January 7, 2025. Proposals can be in English (300 words) or Japanese (600 characters). Please include a short bio (50-75 words in English or 100-150 characters in Japanese).
Keynote: George T. Sipos (West University of Timisoara/ Gannon University): Japan and the Iron Curtain: Between Exoticism and Imaginary Land of Freedom.
For any inquiries, please contact me at irinaholca@tufs.ac.jp.
Best,
Irina Holca (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
ASCJ 2025 (Sophia U)
The Executive Committee of the Asian Studies Conference Japan (ASCJ) invites proposals for panels, roundtables, and individual papers to be presented at the 2025 Asian Studies Conference Japan. Next year’s conference will be held on the Yotsuya Campus of Sophia University in late June/early July. Please check the website regularly for an announcement of the conference dates.
As in past years, all presentations are to be delivered in English. Proposals may be submitted online between September 25 and October 31. Results will be announced by late December.
Each participant is allowed to present only one panel or individual paper during the conference. (This restriction applies to co-authored and co-presented papers.) Furthermore, during the conference, presenters may also be the chair of their own panel or of another one, but no presenter should be the discussant for their own panel. Presenters may be the discussant for a different panel.
The forms and further information are available at:
https://ascjapan.org/conference/call-for-papers/
Submission Categories
Panels are proposed by individual scholars around a common subject. A complete panel includes up to five participants (three or four paper presenters and one or more chair/discussants). Panel proposals should include a 250-word (maximum) abstract from each participant as well as a 250-word (maximum) statement that explains the session as a whole. Only complete panels will be considered for acceptance.
Roundtable Sessions are a discussion format centered around a particular topic. This is not a formal paper presentation session. The roundtable should aim at stimulating interaction, debate, and discussion among its participants and those in attendance. A maximum of six active participants is recommended. While a roundtable proposal will not be as detailed as a panel proposal, it should explain fully the purpose, themes or issues, and scope of the session.
Individual papers give scholars an opportunity to participate in the conference even if they are not able to put together a complete panel. Please note, however, that only 8-10 Individual Paper sessions are created each year, hence the acceptance rate is very low. Senior scholars should consider organizing or joining an organized panel proposal. PhD students and early career scholars are encouraged to consider organizing or joining a panel proposal to increase the odds of acceptance on the program. Papers may be co-authored, but only the names of registered participants will appear on the program.
The Executive Committee encourages members to submit proposals that, by focusing on more than one region or by drawing on more than one discipline, will attract a broad range of scholarly interest. Suggestions for innovative alternatives to the panels, individual papers and roundtables described above are also encouraged.
The Executive Committee strongly encourages graduate student participation and it will give favorable consideration to panels that embed students alongside more seasoned scholars.
Since 2014 the ASCJ has awarded the L.B. Grove Graduate Student Paper Prize. For details on this competition please see the “Conference” section of the ASCJ website. To be considered for this prize the student must be enrolled in a degree program at a Japanese university and be accepted as a presenter at the ASCJ 2025 Conference. The deadline for submission of the completed paper is June 15, 2025. The winner will be announced at the time of the keynote lecture.
I and my colleagues on the Executive Committee look forward to seeing you in Tokyo in 2025.
Christian Hess
ASCJ President