CALL FOR PAPERS: The Life of Testimony / Testimony of Lives - a life-writing conference

Testimony evokes first and foremost legal connotations and images of the courtroom. In this context testimony is bound by strict procedural conventions and the act of testifying in a courtroom can incur actual legal consequences. Outside of the courtroom, however, life-writing (in its broadest sense) can serve as a form of testimony which, while not necessarily causing specific legal ramifications, presents a life’s experience for judgment by the public. This relationship between an idea of testimony and the practice of life-writing is twofold: on the one hand, authors of life-writing may have certain testimonial or confessional intentions and use writing as a way of bearing witness. Readers, on the other hand, may interpret various forms of life-writing as testimony even if the author’s intentions about recording their experience are unknown. The act of interpreting or employing life-writing as testimony thus demands ethical scrutiny from readers as well as scholars using such materials.

This conference aims to explore the notion of testimony as an idea that pervades the practice, reception and interpretation of life-writing across time periods, academic disciplines and literatures. We are interested in testimony as a broad concept, and hope to investigate its scope and impact as an interpretive lens through which the breadth of life-writing can be viewed. Not only does testimony bear witness to the lives of individuals, it takes on a life (and even an afterlife) of its own as it is read and reinterpreted throughout history.

Confirmed Keynotes: Professor Paul Strohm (Columbia University), Professor Roger Woods (Nottingham University).

Papers are invited from all scholars (including postgraduate students) across the fields of (comparative) literature, history, philosophy, art, cultural studies, religious studies, curation and conservation of archival material, memory studies, and film studies. Topics could include but are not limited to:

· The ethics of producing, reading and interpreting life-writing as a form of testimony
· Stylistic, rhetorical and aesthetic dimensions of life-writing
· The relationship between authors and readers of life-writing
· Truth and subjectivity
· The afterlife of testimony
· Images as testimony
· Culture as testimony, eg. published diaries of Holocaust survivors
· Persuasion and manipulation of and within life-writing sources
· Instrumentalisation of life-writing for political purposes
· Life-writing as (historical) evidence and the act of bearing witness
· Life-writing and the law
· Reappropriation and adaptation of life-writing in popular culture
· History and the individual
· Challenges and conditions of writing lives

The conference will be hosted at Queen Mary University of London (Arts Two lecture theatre) on 5 and 6 May 2016, the registration fee will be £35,-/£20,- (non-concession/concession).

Please submit a short abstract (c. 300 words) and a short bio (c. 100 words) to Lotte Fikkers and Melissa Schuh at lifeoftestimony@gmail.com by Sunday 17 January 2016. Notification of acceptance will be given by 8 February 2016.

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Idea of a Life, 1500-1700

Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford University

MBI Al Jaber Auditorium, Corpus Christi College, Friday 17 June 2016

‘I pray you, in your letters, 

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am’ 

-- Othello, Act 5, Scene 2

What was a life in early modern England and Europe? What patterns and templates were used to sort, sift, organise and represent experience? How were models for a life produced and reworked? How was a life evaluated, in terms of various sorts of good — moral, spiritual, civic, familial, economic? What were the moments, and what were the processes, by which a representation of a life was circulated? Are Burckhardtian models of the birth of Renaissance individuality and depth still useful to describe early modern culture, or do we need new paradigms? If much recent early modern work has been organised around ideas of networks, coteries and communities, how has the idea of a life
been revised? 

If autobiography is often seen as a nineteenth-century form, what kind of pre-history does it experience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How has the turn to the archive reformed our sense of early modern lives? For scholars today, what is the status of biography as a way of organising analysis of the period?

The Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford University invites proposals for 20-minute papers on topics that engage with the idea of a life, 1500-1700, from any disciplinary perspective. Papers are welcome on English or European materials, and from all disciplinary perspectives.

Papers might include (but are not limited to) topics such as:

• Life and the archive: inclusions, exclusions, mediations
• Memorialization: modes of remembering a life
• Recording lives: note-taking, diary keeping, commonplace books, information management
• Classical models of a life
• Saints lives and martyrologies
• Public and private lives: honour, service, love, family
• Typology and reiterated lives
• Interiority and inwardness
• Experimental predestinarianism, and the search for signs of grace
• Conduct books
• Fulfilment, contentment, happiness
• Posthumous lives, reputation, honour, influence
• Forms of autobiography and experiments in life-writing
• Lives of artists
• Exemplary lives
• The good life
• The role of biography in early modern studies
• Editing lives and letters
• The stages of life: youth and age.

Please send a 300-word proposal and a brief (one-page) CV to Dr Adam Smyth
(adam.smyth@balliol.ox.ac.uk) by 25 April 2016.

Writing the lives of people and things, AD 500-1700

Chawton House Library, 1st-2nd March 2012

Hosted by the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture, University of Southampton

Writing the lives of people and things, AD 500-1700: an inter-disciplinary conference

Key-note speaker: Charles Nicholl

[Freelance writer, author of The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street

and The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe]

CALL FOR PAPERS


This conference is intended to push the boundaries of research in biography by bringing together postgraduates and early-career researchers from across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Biography has particular relevance in contemporary scholarship as it encompasses every field of human experience. As a result, scholars are becoming increasingly interested in using the lives of individuals to elucidate the past. In the fields of archaeology and anthropology, too, object biography has been a growing area of theoretical research in the past thirty years. This interest in the stories objects can tell resulted in the British Museum and BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects, broadcast in 2010.

We welcome abstracts of no more than 200 words for 20 minute papers from postgraduates and early-career researchers of the medieval and renaissance periods with an interest in biography. The conference themes will include (but are not limited to):

· Artefact biography and human interaction with physical objects through time.
· The experience of life in settled spaces.
· Biography through portraiture and clothing.
· The imaginative recreation of individual lives and mentalities through micro-history.
· The relationship of the self to society, i.e. through social cultural or economic interactions.
· The exploration of the self through music.
· New perspectives on the ‘discovery of the individual’ during the medieval period and renaissance.
· The cementing of social and creative networks and affiliations through the ownership of manuscripts and objects.
· Scientific approaches to biographical interpretations of manuscripts, objects, paintings and human remains.


Please send abstracts along with your name, affiliation and email address to:Gemma Watson at glw1g09@soton.ac.uk and Robert Smith at rfws206@soton.ac.uk

The deadline for abstracts is 31st October 2011.