Women Modernists and Spirituality: a Symposium
University of Stirling, 22-23 May 2014
Keynote speakers
Suzanne Hobson, Queen Mary University of London
Lara Vetter, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Call for Papers:
Recent criticism in modernist studies indicates a growing interest in the relationship between spirituality (broadly understood to include religious structures and practices as well as less traditional engagements with the sacred) and modernist discourse. This symposium aims to bring modernism and spirituality together with research on women modernists, many of whom still call for greater critical attention. It will focus on women modernists and foreground gender in analysis of modernism and spirituality in order to highlight and problematise issues including the relationships between spirituality and embodiment, authority, domesticity, the public sphere and creative practice.
From Edith Sitwell’s incarnational poetics to Mary Butts’s pagan landscapes; from Elizabeth Smart’s engagement with the King James Bible to Dorothy Richardson’s interest in Quakerism, the symposium seeks to address spirituality in all its guises in the work of modernist women.
Papers are not limited to literary criticism; the symposium invites papers that consider a range of modernist fields, including art, film, music, philosophy, etc.
Abstracts of 250-350 words are invited for twenty minute papers on any aspect of the symposium’s theme. Papers may consider (but are not limited to) the following:
• spirituality and embodiment
• spirituality and feminism
• spirituality and form
• spirituality and the everyday
• spirituality and material culture
• religion, gender and authority
• modernism and the occult
• the feminine divine
• religious conflict or dissent
• modernist syncretism
• spirituality and domesticity and/or the public sphere
• modernism and sacred texts
• mysticism
• engagement with institutional religion
• transnational modernism and spirituality
• modernism and pilgrimage
• spirituality and creativity
• religious communities and networks
• religious hermeneutics
• minority (religious, racial, etc.) voices
Please send abstracts to Elizabeth Anderson by 3 March 2014.
The Symposium is held in association with the Scottish Network for Modernist Studies (SNoMS); the Centre for Gender and Feminist Studies, University of Stirling; and the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling.