An international conference to be held at the Darwin Conference Suite, University of Kent at Canterbury, England

July 9-11, 2010

CALL FOR PAPERS

The conference marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the H. G. Wells Society in 1960 together with the centenary of Wells’s comic masterpiece The History of Mr Polly. It will take place in what Mr Polly found to be the ‘congenial situation’ of Canterbury, the Kentish cathedral city within easy reach of Folkestone and Sandgate where Wells lived in the early twentieth century and wrote some of his best-known works.

We shall examine Wells both as a novelist formed by local circumstances of his time and place, and as a thinker and social prophet who remains intensely relevant today. We aim to discuss Wells’s links to modern science fiction in all media, his imagining of worlds to come, his political, social and ecological expectations for the 21st century, and his success as an artist and controversialist both then and now.

We invite proposals for papers on all aspects of Wells’s life and writings: his science fiction, his novels and short stories, his political, sociological and autobiographical works, and his contributions to education, journalism and the cinema. In keeping with the conference title ‘From Kent to Cosmopolis’ we hope to attract contributions which relate the local to the universal in his writings and/or look at Wells’s achievements in relation to wider cultural, historical, temporal and spatial perspectives.

250 word abstracts for 20-minute papers should be sent by 1 March 2010 to Andrew M. Butler and Patrick Parrinder at 2010wellsconference@gmail.com

Priority booking for the conference at bargain rates is available up to 30 June 2009. Contact the Hon. Treasurer, Paul Allen, at PaulMalcolmAllen [remove and replace with at sign] aol.com

There's something I can't put my finger on here... I have no idea why completed papers are necessary two months before the conference.



CALL FOR PAPERS
1st International CCCU Queer Studies Conference

Queering Paradigms
Canterbury Christ Church University
27-28 February 2009

Key note speaker:
Robert Mills (King’s College, London): Adventures in the Queer Museum

Conference Aim
The aim of this conference is to look at the status quo and the challenges in the future of Queer Studies from a broad multi-, trans-disciplinary and polythetic angle.
Participants will represent the whole spectrum of academia and will present papers and panels from the angle of Education, Health & Social Studies, Business, Sciences, Arts, and Humanities.
This conference aims to combine and showcase the great range of expertise held at the CCCU in area’s relating to Queer Studies; additionally, a wider range of national and international external specialists will be invited to contribute.

Queer Studies
The definition for 'queer' adopted for this purpose is not restricted to LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender), but holistic along the lines of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's definition in her essay “Queer and Now”:
That's one of the things that 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically.
In contemporary Western society, we can approach 'queerness' as querying, contrasting, challenging and transforming hetero-normativity.

Call For Papers
Papers and Panel proposals are invited on any area and aspect of Queer Studies.
The proposals will undergo a peer-review process; the Proceedings of this conference will be prepared for a (RAE-able) publication with a major Academic Press (Cambridge University Press has already signalled strong interest).

Proposal abstract deadline: 1 September 2008
Deadline for completed papers: 2 January 2009

Proposals for individual papers should take the form of abstracts of not more than 400 words; panel proposals should include both a panel rationale and paper abstracts.

All proposals should be sent by email before September, 1st 2008 to
Dr Burkhard Scherer (Theology & RS, CCCU); burkhard.scherer@canterbury.ac.uk