Footnotes: The English Department Newsletter
Volume 54 | November 9, 2009 | Number 12
FROM THE GRADUATE STUDIES OFFICE
Fellowship Payment
Graduate students on fellowship for the Fall semester (8/16/09-12/15/09), will receive their last fellowship payment on 12/16/09.
Reminder to Grad Students
The Registrar does not take account of teaching and research appointments when certifying full-time status of students. TAs with student loans must carry 12 hours when full-time certification is necessary. (Requirements can differ; check with your loan company.) If you have any questions concerning your status, check with Stephanie Shockey in 210 EB.
Congratulations!
Melissa Tombro successfully defended her dissertation “Performance Studies and the Reinvention of "I" in Composition: Moving Myself Beyond a Textual Model” (Hawhee, Ch.; Schaffner, Walker, Denzin) on 10/30/09.
Fall 2009 – Dates to Remember
November 13: Last day for student to drop a semester course without a grade of W (without approval)
November 13: Last day to elect credit-no-credit option for a semester course or to change from credit-no-credit option to a regular grade
November 13: Last day to withdraw from the current term without a grade of W
November 13: Last day to add name to Dec. degree list
November 13: Last day to take final exam for Dec. doctoral degree
Nov 21 - 29: Fall vacation for students
Nov 26 - 27: Thanksgiving Break (all campus holiday)
November 30: Instruction resumes
December 4: Last day to drop a second half-session course
December 4: Last day to elect credit-no-credit option for a second half-session course or to change from credit-no-credit option to a regular grade
December 4: Last day to deposit Dec. doctoral dissertations
December 4: Deadline for Office of the Registrar to receive the final exam Certificate of Result
December 9: Instruction ends
December 10: Last day to add or drop a second half-session course with approval (a W is recorded)
December 10: Last day to add or drop a semester course with approval (a W is recorded)
December 10: Reading Day
December 10: Last day to change a grade of DFR (in a non-thesis course) or I, awarded last spring or summer to prevent F by rule
December 11: Last day to deposit Dec. master’s theses
Dec 11 – 18: Final examination period
December 21: Dec. degree conferral (no commencement)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Call for Papers: Belief and Disbelief in the Space Between, 1914-1945
Proposals requested for the 12th Annual Conference of The Space Between Society: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945, University of Portland, Portland, Oregon, June 17-19, 2010.
Keynote Speaker: Gauri Viswanathan
Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University Author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998).
The interwar years have often been regarded as a period of secularization, disillusionment, and disenchantment, yet many of the period’s cultural productions engage questions of faith, Belief, and spirituality. This interdisciplinary conference invites literary and cultural critics, historians, and scholars of modern religion and philosophy to explore a range of topics relating to the collision of belief and disbelief in the years between 1914 and 1945.
Possible topics include:
--religious themes and traditions in the arts and popular culture
--the impact of war on faith and the apprehension of the unseen
--new conceptions of the sacred and the profane
--The rise of faith-infused nationalisms
--Political propaganda as secular dogma
--artistic representations of the supernatural or the fantastic
--aesthetic principles informed by belief or disbelief
--The public and private dimensions of faith and doubt
--Disillusionment in traditional institutions
--The coexistence of magic and science
--The role of class, gender, and/or ethnicity in religious identification
--Engagement with non-Western religions and those crossing cultural, ethnic, and national boundaries
Please send 300-word abstract and one-page CV to Genevieve Brassard (Brassard@up.edu).
Deadline for submission: January 15, 2010.
If you haven't renewed your membership to the society, or would simply like to subscribe to our journal, "The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945," you will find a subscription form attached to this email.
See file in 213 EB (Journals Room).
Call for Papers: The Renaissance Arts of Science and Nature
A Two Day Conference held by the Early Modern Colloquium
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
February 19-20, 2010
Keynote Speakers: Laurie Shannon (Northwestern University), Carla Mazzio (SUNY Buffalo)
The Early Modern Colloquium, a graduate interdisciplinary group at the University of Michigan, is requesting submissions for its conference on the arts of science and nature in early modern culture, to be held February 19-20, 2010.
Broadly conceived, this conference intends to investigate the relationship between the arts and sciences in the early modern period. In contrast to modern disciplinary practices, which tend to distinguish between – if not divorce – humanistic practice from scientific endeavor, extant works from the early modern period reveal a complicated, potentially constitutive relationship between these two fields of intellectual inquiry, evinced by the term “natural philosophy”. How might cross-disciplinary thinking – modern and early modern – inform our understanding of the early modern period? We seek submissions that address these issues or which respond to any of the following questions:
To what extent did the arts and natural sciences/philosophies depend upon one another during the early modern period? How were these “disciplines” delineated from – and/or defined in relation to – one another? How can we, as modern scholars, approach and consider potential dialogues between these disciplines? In what forms did such exchange(s) take place? What factors enabled the distinction between the arts and the sciences? How did scientific praxes – including but not limited to alchemy, humoral medicine, anatomy, mathematics, geometry, optics, or astronomy – inform early modern culture? How did such praxes appear within, influence, inform or challenge the fields of literature, visual art, music, or architecture? How did the relationship of sciences to the arts inform the orders of nature, the taxonomies in which humans and animals were placed in relation to one another? In what ways did craft or artisanal practice enable a merging of science and art? How might contemporary scientific practice and knowledge inform our understanding of the arts in the early modern period?
This conference is co-sponsored by the Early Modern Colloquium, the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and the Departments of English and Romance Languages & Literatures at the University of Michigan. We therefore welcome submissions from these disciplines and a wide range of others, including history, art history, musicology, theater history, philosophy, and anthropology. Priority will be given to graduate students.
200-250 word proposals should be sent to Andrew Bozio (bozio@umich.edu) by December 1, 2009.
