CFP: Comparing Centres, Comparing Peripheries (for young researchers in the humanities)

A conference that may also be of interest to graduate students in Translation Studies: 

British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA)/ SOAS Research Students Conference

19-21 Jan 2012, SOAS, UK

 
Comparing Centres, Comparing Peripheries

Keynote speakers: Prof. Susan Bassnett (Warwick), TBA

How do we, as young researchers in the humanities, identify what is central and peripheral to our topics, fields, academic circles? How does our work follow and challenge existing positionings? 

The problematic of the centre and the periphery presents itself as crucial for comparative research in the humanities. For example, literary or cultural comparison and translation are employed and studied as means of understanding what is relatively peripheral or unknown in terms of what is more central or familiar. Work on national literatures reveals intricate dynamics between the central and the peripheral, as well as the past and the present. Postcolonial research examines constructions of centres and margins in colonial, postcolonial, or neo-colonial settings, while studies of ‘world literature’ attempt to map literary capitals and provinces.

The conference intends to bring together postgraduate researchers from all universities working in comparative literature, literary studies, postcolonial studies, translation studies, world literature, or other related fields. N.B.: students whose research has a non-literary focus while engaging with these themes are also welcome.

 

Papers may address questions which include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Comparison as a movement from centre to periphery or in reverse

- Translation as an exchange between centres and peripheries

- Postcolonial challenge to the opposition of centrality and marginality

- World literature, its capitals, provinces, and geographies

- Relationships between comparative literature, postcolonial studies, translation studies, world literature, and other related fields: perceived centres, overlaps, and peripheries

- Topics and concerns at the centres of our disciplines; topics marginalized within those disciplines; new research shifting the centres of the disciplinesCentrifugal and centripetal forces in interdisciplinary research

- Relationship between the core/periphery binary and contemporary academic practice

- Academic centres and margins; publishing centres and margins

- Centres and margins of the past, as seen today

- Centres in dialogue and conflict

- Peripheral traffic, bypassing the centre

- Peripheries within centres and centres of peripheries

Please send a 250 word proposal for a 20 minute paper and a short bio to Dorota Goluch and Rashi Rohatgi at d.goluch.09 at ucl.ac.uk and researchsoc at soas.ac.uk by 20 November 2011. Please use the same contacts for queries.