events – NORSES

Announcement: extension of deadline

To enable all PhD students who would like to take part in this year’s ESSE Doctoral Symposium to submit a proposal, the ESSE Executive has decided to extend the period during which applications can be accepted to 31 January 2025.

Full information about the Symposium, which will take place on 3 and 4 September 2025 at the University of Malta, in the capital city of Valletta, can be found here.

Supervisors of PhD students in the second or later year of their doctoral trajectory should encourage their students to participate. Substantial financial support is available to mitigate the costs of travel and accommodation.

The hundreds of PhD-holders in English Studies who participated in the Symposium at some point in the run-up to their graduation can testify that the experience was important or even decisive for the content of their thesis and their academic career. Not only do the attendees get the chance to present their ideas (and their anxieties) to an international audience composed of experts in research methodology and their peers from other European countries, but they also can profit from opportunities to form international connections and to enjoy the benefits of research collaboration.

The ESSE Board, representing all thirty-three Associations federated within the Society, is enthusiastic in its support for the Symposium. The extension of the application deadline will make it possible for that support to be translated into reality again this year.

NAES 2025: “Attending to the Islands: Archipelagic Perspectives on Anglophonia”

Nordic Association for English Studies Triennial ConferenceÅbo / Turku Finland, 8–10 May 2025

In an ever bustling, ever hurrying world, the concept of attention has become increasingly important. As Jonathan Crary observed in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, the “contemporary experience […] requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment”.[1] At the same time, contemporary society has been significantly impacted by seemingly conflicting forces and paradoxical processes of attention and distraction in various institutional, cultural, and technological contexts. The focus of this conference will be on any of the many ways in which the field of English Studies – and disciplinary perspectives from literature, culture, and history to linguistics and education – addresses and is shaped by various aspects of attention. These range from tensions between mediated experience and phenomenal perception to how political and cultural narratives direct our attention to some aspects of society while creating blind spots elsewhere. In addition to abstracts exploring this theme, the NAES are glad to invite panel suggestions on administrative issues as well as proposals for papers on other areas of interest related to Nordic English Studies.

Themes for discussion include, but are not limited to, the following:

Attending to the Islands: Archipelagic Perspectives on English Studies
Surveillance, control, and the politics of attention
Technology and the media: forms of attention and inattention
Borders, surveys, and mappings
Nordic English Studies and attention in education
Local, global, and transnational attention – place, mobility, and migration
Hotspots and blind spots: geography and the environment
Attention, crisis, and catastrophe: personal and social perspectives
Attention and the phenomenology of perception
The aesthetics and poetics of attention in literature and the arts; authorship, narrative, perspective
Generational and societal changes in attention
Religion, politics, and social groups
Ageing and attention
Attending to language: linguistics, translation, and the multilingual society
Diachronic and/or synchronic approaches and methods

Proposals for individual 20-minute presentations or panels/roundtables (3 speakers) should be sent by email to info-naes@abo.fi by 16 December 2024.

Proposals should include: name(s), institutional affiliation(s), paper title(s), a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical note of up to 50 words for each participant. (Three speaker panels may allow 200 words for the overall proposal, 200 words for each speaker’s abstract, and 50 words for each individual biography.) Panel/roundtable proposals should also identify the contact person for the entire session. Prospective speakers will be notified of a decision by 30 January 2025. At the time of the conference, accepted speakers will have 20 minutes at their disposal (with an extra 10 minutes set aside for discussion), and should be fully paid-up members of the NAES.

Hosted by Åbo Akademi University and the University of Turku, the conference is organized in collaboration with the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS) whose concurrent annual conference in Åbo / Turku is titled “Attending to Ireland”.

Conference Web page: https://blogs2.abo.fi/naes-efacis2025/

Åbo / Turku (the former capital of Finland) is usually very pleasant at the beginning of May. And as the city is situated on the edge of the Finnish archipelago, we envisage that the conference programme will include an optional boat trip through the islands, a visit to Turku Castle, poetry readings, a musical entertainment, and more …

– KEYNOTE SPEAKERS –

Fiona Farr

Lorna Hutson

Christopher Morash

Andrew Newby

Invited Poet: Desmond Egan

[1] Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (The MIT Press, 1999), p. 1.