The Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies is pleased to announce a two-day conference, to take place at Leeds Trinity University on 30 and 31 May 2019. We are delighted to have Professor Christine Ferguson (University of Stirling), and Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck, University of London) as our keynote speakers.
Description:
Since the emergence of modern mediumship in the middle of the nineteenth century, science and spiritualism have been interwoven. Sceptics and believers alike have investigated spirit and psychic phenomena to determine its legitimacy. This two-day interdisciplinary conference will explore the history of the intersection of science and spiritualism during the long nineteenth century.
Key scholarship includes: • Ferguson, Christine, Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writings 1848-1930, Edinburgh University Press, 2012. • Lamont, Peter, Extraordinary Beliefs: A Historical Approach to a Psychological Problem, Cambridge University Press, 2013 • Luckhurst, Roger, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870-1901, Oxford University Press, 2002 • McCorristine, Shane, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920, Cambridge University Press, 2010 • Oppenheim, Janet, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914, Cambridge University Press, 1985 • Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, University of Chicago Press, 2004
We welcome proposals from any discipline, covering any geographic region.
Image credit: From Camille Flammarion, Mysterious Forces, Boston MA, 1907
Possible topics include: • Scientific investigations at séances • Scientific literature on spirit and psychic phenomena • Technology and spiritualism (such as photography, telegraphy, telephony) • Medicine and spiritualism (such as studies in physiology and psychology) • Shamanism, animism and spiritualism in anthropology • Science, spiritualism and the periodical press • Cultures of science and religion and its connection to spiritualism • Spiritualism and material culture (such as haunted objects or locations) • Contesting cultural authority in spiritualism cases • Scientific experiments on spiritualism • Crisis of evidence in spirit and psychic investigations • Magicians and spiritualism (such as exposing fraud through replicating tricks) • Science and spiritualism in literature (such as Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge’) • Scientists as spiritualists and spiritualists as scientists
Please send a 250-word abstract, along with contact information to e.sera-shriar@leedstrinity.ac.uk. The Deadline for submission is 15 November 2018.
Some small travel bursaries will be available to postgraduate and early career scholars. If you would like to be considered for one, please include a short expression of interest detailing your research, and how this conference will be of benefit to you.
A Conference Sponsored by the Law and Humanities Law Institute and Thomas Jefferson School of Law
June 5-6, 2014 at
Thomas Jefferson School of Law
1155 Island Avenue, San Diego CA 92101
Call For Papers
On June 5 and 6, 2014, the Law and Humanities Institute, New York, New York (USA) and Thomas Jefferson School of Law, San Diego, CA (USA) will sponsor a Conference on Law and Magic.
Law and magic interact in many ways. Not only can the law influence the practice of magic, such as in the areas of freedom of speech and religion and intellectual property; but also magic can influence the law, such as in trial tactics and evidence. In addition, magic illuminates the crossroads of other law and humanities fields, such as the emerging area of law and neuroscience, rhetoric, and law and popular culture. Papers discussing or developing these or any aspect of the relationship between law and magic are welcome, especially those that further an understanding of the theory, underpinnings, and/or philosophy of the field.
Materials and presentations will be in English. The organizers of the conference are Christine Corcos, Louisiana State University Law Center (christine.corcos at law.lsu.edu) and Julie Cromer Young, Thomas Jefferson School of Law (jcromer at tjsl.edu). We invite you to submit an abstract of a 20-minute paper that you would like to deliver at the conference. Abstracts should be between 250 and 500 words and sent to Christine Corcos at the email address above accompanied by the author’s brief biographical statement. Please put “Law and Magic Conference June 2014” in the email subject line and submit the abstract and biographical statement no later than November 1, 2013. We will send notifications regarding acceptance of presentations by February 1, 2014.
If you would like us to consider your paper for publication, please indicate that in the body of your email. Conference papers accepted for publication will appear in the Spring 2015 issue of the Thomas Jefferson Law Review.
Please address questions to Christine Corcos at the email address above.
Call for Writers – Womens [sic] Voices in Magic Email for inquiries and submissions: brandyeditor at gmail.com
Megalithica Books, an imprint of Immanion Press (Stafford, U.K./Portland, OR, U.S.A) is seeking submissions for an anthology on women working in the magical communities, particularly in communities where women have not been extensively published or in which women face stereotyping and misunderstanding within and without the community. These communities include (but are not limited to) groups and individuals working in the Golden Dawn, Thelemic, Aurum Solis, Alchemy, Chaos, and Experimental Fields.
Women have been involved in traditional and ritual magic since the late Victorian era. However women are often viewed as tangential to these communities or as soror mysticae, assistants to the magician. Today women are actively involved in ceremonial magical groups and lodges, alchemy, chaos magic, and Experimental Magic, overcoming stereotypes and creating new visions of magic within the communities.
The Society for Utopian Studies has issued a Call for Papers for a special issue of its journal, devoted to Law and Utopia.
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Utopian Studies on Law and Utopia Guest Editor: Peter Sands, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Utopias are prescriptive, normative alternatives to already existing societies. Thomas More, himself a lawyer, envisioned a society free from lawyers and with few positive laws, and that trope has since made frequent appearance in utopias and dystopias. But, like all societies, utopias depend on rules and rule-making—they are societies of laws.
Law itself, too, is a utopian expression, an attempt to shape a particular vision of society. Such visions enact conflicts between and among competing views of rights, duties, punishment, redemption, distribution, and nearly every other aspect of human life. Zoning laws describe someone’s desired organization of space and industry. Constitutions write into being a normative alternative to the society that exists before the constitution takes effect. Positive law presents a normatively different belief system from natural law, carrying implications for societal organization.
In fiction and film, utopian and dystopian expression addresses fundamental jurisprudential issues of good and evil, of right and wrong, of rights proper, of economics, criminality, state power and more. A Handmaid’s Tale dramatizes, for example, conflicts over reproductive rights; The Dispossessed juxtaposes anarchist, capitalist, and socialist societies. Soylent Green and Zardoz imagine wholly alternate legal structures and their consequences.
For this special issue of Utopian Studies we invite papers on any aspect of law and utopia.
Utopian Studies Department of English University of Alaska Anchorage 3211 Providence Drive Anchorage, AK 99508 e-mail: utopia@uaa.alaska.edu Inquiries about the special issue to: Peter Sands
Christopher Buccafusco has posted this Call for Papers on Food and the Law.
The field of food studies has grown enormously over the last decade, as evidenced in part by the steadily increasing number of academics and professionals in the humanities, social and nutrition sciences, culinary arts, and hospitality studies who have become engaged in cross-disciplinary conversations about food. Operating in tandem with the explosion of popular fascination with food, these conversations have been joined of late by academics, attorneys, and activists who are particularly concerned with the question of how our relationship to food is, has been, and should be, mediated through law. In response to this emerging area of inquiry, we are soliciting both conference papers and publishable essays that integrate multidisciplinary scholarship in food studies with legal scholarship related to food in existing fields such as agricultural, constitutional, criminal, administrative, tort, intellectual property, and international trade law.
Among the questions we hope to answer are: How might one account for the law’s varying treatment of food over time and/or cross-culturally? What role does law play in shaping cultural ideas about food production, trade, and consumption?
And, inversely, what role does food play in shaping ideas about the law?
Initially we seek papers written from a variety of perspectives appropriate for presentation at one or both of the following conferences: the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (Suffolk University Law School, Boston, April 3-4, 2009) and the Association for the Study of Food and Society (details for the 2009 conference TBA on the ASFS website). Although we aim to use these panels as a partial foundation for creating the edited collection, we are also happy to consider abstracts and articles from potential contributors who are unable to attend either ASLCH or ASFS. Finished essays should be of a quality suitable for publication with an established university press and reasonably accessible to a multidisciplinary audience of scholars and students of the law, social sciences, and humanities, as well as interested readers outside the academy.
Topics can include, but are not limited to:
Intellectual property rights in food and recipes Prison food, e.g., hunger strikes & force feeding, Nutraloaf Last meals Food torts, e.g. exploding sodas, fingers in chili, coffee in the lap Regulation of food, alcohol, and/or obesity Dietary laws and regulations in different cultures History of dietary laws and regulations Geographical indications of origin Farm subsidies and international trade law Linguistic classification of food, e.g., kosher, 1st Growths, Organic Sumptuary laws Famine and famine aid Labeling, packaging, and branding Rationing Food stamps Ethanol production and the food supply Illegal food production, commerce, and consumption Agricultural nuisance and zoning law Food and environmental law
Please submit a paragraph author’s bio and an abstract of no more than 500 words to Doris Witt (doris-witt@uiowa.edu), Chris Buccafusco (cjb@law.uiuc.edu), AND Amy Dillard (adillard@ubalt.edu). Abstracts for ASLCH are due by Oct. 1, 2008; abstracts for ASFS or for the essay collection alone are due by Jan. 15, 2009. Please indicate clearly whether the abstract is for ASLCH, ASFS, the essay collection, or some combination thereof. Finished essays should be approximately 10,000 words in length and will be due on or before January 1, 2010.
In advance of submitting an abstract, please feel free to contact Doris Witt, Christopher Buccafusco, or Amy Dillard with any questions about the conference panels or the essay collection.
Not a lot of time to submit, but the Birkbeck Early Modern Society has posted this Call for Papers:
OUR SECOND STUDENT CONFERENCE:
JOURNEYS AND ENCOUNTERS
Saturday 12 July 2008, 10.00-16.30,
Room 538, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Birkbeck Early Modern Society is pleased to announce our second student conference. We aim to provide a safe and constructive space for students to present their research and to network and exchange ideas with peers from a range of disciplines. The day promises to be an ideal forum to showcase student research and to provide opportunities to practice presentation skills.
Our theme this year is ‘Journeys and Encounters’.
We are interested in ideas of ‘journeys and encounters’ in early modern travel but also more broadly in relation to art, consumption, material culture, literature, politics, law, medicine, religion, magic, science and ideas. We are looking for a diverse collection of papers, based on any subject that can be connected to our theme ‘Journeys and Encounters’ in the early modern period (roughly 1500-1800). Here are some points that you may wish to consider but feel free to carry out your own interpretation:
• Types of journey – geographical, religious, political, psychological, philosophical • Encounters and their outcomes – between people, cultures, ideas • When does a journey, of any kind, begin and finish? • Is it helpful to use encounters as milestones when writing history?
You are invited to submit a proposal for a paper lasting 20-30 minutes (approximately 2,000-3,000 words).
Please email your proposal for a paper in the form of a synopsis of about 250 words to the Secretary of the Birkbeck Early Modern Society, Laura Jacobs.
UCLA School of Law, Columbia Law School, University of Southern California Center for Law, History & Culture, and Georgetown University Law Center invite submissions for the sixth meeting of the Law & Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop to be held at UCLA Law School in Los Angeles, CA on June 8 & 9, 2008.
PAPER COMPETITION:
The paper competition is open to untenured professors, advanced graduate students and post-doctoral scholars in law and the humanities; in addition to drawing from numerous humanistic fields, the Workshop welcomes critical, qualitative work in the social sciences.Between five and ten papers will be chosen, based on anonymous evaluation by an interdisciplinary selection committee, for presentation at the June Workshop.At the Workshop, two senior scholars will comment on each paper.Commentators and other Workshop participants will be asked to focus specifically on the strengths and weaknesses of the selected scholarly projects, with respect to subject and methodology.Moreover, the selected papers will then serve as the basis for a larger conversation among all the participants about the evolving standards by which we judge excellence and creativity in interdisciplinary scholarship, as well as about the nature of interdisciplinarity itself.
Papers should be works-in-progress between 10,000 and 15,000 words in length (including footnotes/endnotes), and must include an abstract of no more than 200 words. A dissertation chapter may be submitted but we strongly suggest that it be edited so that it stands alone as a piece of work with its own integrity. A paper that has been submitted for publication is eligible as long as it will not be in galley proofs or in print at the time of the Workshop.The selected papers will appear in a special issue of the Legal Scholarship Network; there is no other publication commitment.The Workshop will pay the travel expenses of authors whose papers are selected for presentation.
[Cross posted to the Seamless Web, the Law & Humanities Blog]
Submissions (in either Word or Wordperfect, no pdf files) will be accepted until January 8, 2008, and should be sent by e-mail to:
The 6th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts & Humanities will be held from January 11 (Friday) to January 14 (Monday), 2008 at the Waikiki Beach Marriott Resort & Spa, and the Hilton Waikiki Prince Kuhio, in Honolulu, Hawaii. The conference will provide many opportunities for academicians and professionals from arts and humanities related fields to interact with members inside and outside their own particular disciplines. Cross-disciplinary submissions with other fields are welcome.
Topic Areas (All Areas of Arts & Humanities are Invited):
*Anthropology
*American Studies
*Archeology
*Architecture
*Art
*Art History
*Dance
*English
*Ethnic Studies
*Film
*Folklore
*Geography
*Graphic Design
*History
*Landscape Architecture
*Languages
*Literature
*Linguistics
*Music
*Performing Arts
*Philosophy
*Postcolonial Identities
*Product Design
*Religion
*Second Language Studies
*Speech/Communication
*Theatre
*Visual Arts
*Other Areas of Arts and Humanities
*Cross-disciplinary areas of the above related to each other or other areas.
Note the mention of "magic and law" (I've bolded it below).
MAGIC: FRONTIERS AND BOUNDARIES At the University of Waterloo 200 University Avenue West Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1 12-15 June, 2008
Call for Papers
In the history of western culture, magic tends to be a term by which accusations are made or intellectual territories defended; like the terms `heresy' or `perversion,' it does not have a stable or secure content. Any accusation that an act, ritual, or mode of practice is magical will have a formula that is peculiar to the time, place, institution, race, class, or gender of the accuser. Conversely, arguments that magic is a good thing, in a spiritual or material sense, also vary according to context, particularly because pro- and anti-magical arguments develop in relation to each other, and cause changes in one another's rhetorical and conceptual strategies. Assertions that magic exists or does not exist, has ceased to exist, is marginal, is flowering, has just declined or just erupted, is religious or non-religious, scientific or non-scientific, or develops into religion or science are part of an ongoing argument.
This conference will explore the locations, in texts, bodies of texts, or historical contexts, where magic becomes a problem, a disputandum, or a frontier of knowing, from the ancient to the modern period, including modern ritual magic and contemporary magical religions. To put it another way, it will examine specific examples of the relation of magic to convention, to authority, to `religion' and `science' from a sociological or historical perspective. We invite papers for sessions on topics including but not limited to: magical theologies; magical epistemologies; magical sciences; magic and the law; magic and the universities; magic in art and literature; magic, sanctity and inquisition; magic and Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Paganism and new religious movements. If you are interested in presenting a paper, please send title and abstract along with a CV, to the organizers at societas.magica@gmail.com. Proposals must be received by September 1, 2007.
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