CFP: Competing Modernities (31 Jan; 27-28 Apr; UIUC)

Competing Modernities
April 27 – 28, 2007
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The IPRH reading group, British Modernities, in conjunction with Irish Studies
and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, would like to encourage
submissions for our annual graduate student conference. We invite students
from a wide variety of disciplines to submit proposals pertaining to our
conference theme, “Competing Modernities.”

From “alternative modernities” to “a singular modernity,” concepts of modernity
have acquired crucial relevance in recent scholarship. With careful attention to
temporal and geopolitical contingencies, we hope to encourage cross-
disciplinary debate over the stakes of constructing modernities. Together, we
plan to investigate how each era articulates its own relation to the concept of
modernity and registers its own specific claim or resistance to being “modern.”

This year’s keynote speaker, Jules Law, is from the Department of English and
Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. He has published numerous
articles on Hardy, George Eliot, Joyce, Wittgenstein, and Derrida. His first book,
The Rhetoric of Empiricism, examines the metaphors of reflection, surface, and
depth in philosophy, literary criticism, and art criticism from the eighteenth to
the twentieth century. He is currently working on a book entitled The Secret Life
of Fluids: Body, Space, and Social Control in the Victorian Novel.

We welcome papers that consider the following topics or others in relationship
to “modernities”:

ß Colonialism, imperialism, or Empire
ß capitalist modernity
ß science & technology
ß art & literature
ß aesthetic modernity
ß gendering modernity
ß cosmopolitanisms
ß religion & faith
ß the nation & nation-state
ß sex & sexuality
ß queer modernities
ß revolution
ß historicisms & historiography
ß transatlanticism

Please send 250-word abstracts for individual 20-minute papers to
modernities@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is January 20, 2007.
Accepted applicants will be notified by January 31, 2007. In the body of the e-
mail, please include the following information:

Name:
Departmental affiliation(s):
Level of graduate study:
Title of paper:
Contact information:

Participants whose abstracts are selected will be asked to submit full papers by
April 9, 2007.