Australian Women’s History Network Symposium (Web)

Time: Tuesday, 8 July 2014
Venue: Wollongong
Deadline: 15 March 2014

The Symposium will focus on paper and paper-work in history from a gendered perspective. Proposed papers or panels should respond to, but not be limited by, the following themes relating to gendering the archive

• Colonial history and the power of paper
• Newspapers, politics and activism
• Official papers: census, royal commissions, maps, surveys, legislation
• Letters, photos, telegrams, posters
• Changing technologies and paper communication
• Paper trails/ephemera/memory and loss … read more … (Web)

Birkbeck, University of London (Web)

Time: 10-11 July 2014
Venue: London
Deadline: 30.11.2013

This conference will set out to explore how concepts of family have been acted out, reinvented, or deconstructed, through various media including the visual arts, literature, and museum exhibitions, across the centuries.

The family picture will be considered both in its figurative and artefactual forms. We will look at the significance of the family picture in literary works or films, and we will consider alternative concepts of family and kinship as pictured in paintings, photographs, graphic novels, and other visual media. We are interested in media transfers, the question of what happens to family pictures when they are included in literary or visual narratives whether these are autobiographical or fictional. We aim to explore how different media reproduce or replace the family picture, or evoke Continue reading →

Department of Foreign Languages (IF) and the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) (Web), University of Bergen

Venue: Bergen, Norway
Time: April 10-11, 2014
Deadline: January 15, 2014

We invite papers by scholars from a variety of fields (art history, anthropology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, film and media studies, gender studies, history, literature, natural sciences, etc.), who are interested in the ways in which the colonial archive has preserved or impacted the construction of the emblematic figure of Black Venus. Not only do representations of Black Venus often derive from the conflation of exoticism with eroticism, they also embody dichotomies between desire and fear, staging or reading the body as “a cultural rather than natural artifact” (Brooks), the myth of racial difference, and “icon for deviant sexuality,” thus pathology vis-à-vis normal sexuality (Gilman). Black Venus, as understood in this context, is not Continue reading →