Virtual Ecologies
Natura’s 9th Annual Graduate Conference in Science and Epistemology
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
March 6, 2020

Keynote Address:
Lisa Swanstrom (Associate Professor of English, University of Utah)

Call for Papers
Hosted by Natura, a Rutgers University Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Working Group focused on critical perspectives of Science and Epistemology, the 2020 Natura Graduate Conference seeks papers on the topic of virtual ecologies: dreamed, immaterial, digital, imagined, or potential networks of relationships and ruptures between humans, nonhumans, and their environments. 

Digital ecosystems, imagined worlds, abstractions of thought — the virtual pervades the contemporary moment but also possesses a long history, the shadow of the actual or real. The conference seeks to examine the entwined relationships and surprising fractures that develop in the realm of the virtual, broadly construed. How does the virtual interact with the material, the embodied, and the immediate? How does the oikos of ecology — the home, the household, the place to live — transform when it becomes virtual? How do virtualities of the past impinge upon the present, and the present cast a virtual shadow onto the past? Are our ways of knowing intrinsically tied to virtuality, or does knowledge find its home in the material or real? How do power structures, abstractions, forms, and concepts intersect with lived experience and material conditions of existence?

Potential topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Material and mediality
• Games as lived experience
• Environmental advocacy in a digital space
• Virtual literary world
• “Nature” as problem space
• Algorithmic embodiment
• Histories of virtuality and virtuality in history
• Distributed agency
• Mapping, surveillance, and practices of seeing
• Immaterial spatiotemporal architecture and design
• Impossible soundscapes
• Digital pollution
• Virtual repercussions of real-world behavior and real-world consequences to virtual speech

The conference will take place on Friday, March 6th, 2020. Natura invites 250-word abstracts for 20-minute talks on any topic examining the role of virtual ecologies in the sciences and humanities. This event is open to graduate students and scholars working in any area of the arts, humanities, or sciences. Interested faculty or post-doctoral researchers are welcome to contact us about potential roles as panel moderators or discussants. Send proposals or requests for more information to rutgersnatura@gmail.com; proposals should be sent by December 15. Please visit our website at https://virtualecologies.wordpress.com/.

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Natura: The Science and Epistemology Working Group is a graduate student working group within Rutgers University that serves as a forum to foster critical interdisciplinary conversations about the history, cultures, places, and theories of science, epistemology, and knowledge production. We are generously sponsored by the Rutgers British Studies Center, the School of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office, and the Graduate Student Association.

Call for Papers!

Cracking Open the Contact Zone: Imperialism and Indigenous Interaction in Antiquity Department of Classical Studies, Brandeis University Annual Graduate Conference

Keynote Speaker: Linda Gosner, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

Conference Date: April 4th, 2020

The Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis University invites submissions of abstracts for our Annual Graduate Student Conference. This year’s conference examines ways in which indigenous populations interacted with imperial powers in the ancient world. This conference provides a platform for papers exploring the relationship between the conqueror and the conquered, especially in examining modes of resistance, daily life living under occupation, imperialist policies toward conquered peoples, and the socioeconomic effects of imperialism. Priority will be given to papers examining indigenous interaction with imperialism in the ancient world, but other topics related to the conference theme will be considered. We welcome submissions from graduate students of all levels and from disciplines including: Anthropology, Art History, Classics, Comparative Literature, History, Jewish Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Sexuality Studies, and Women’s Studies.

Possible submission topics include, but are not limited to: 

• The justification of imperialist thought in literature
• The colonizer’s view of the colonized, or vice versa
• The effects of imperial policy on the lives of people living in occupied territories
• Cultural hybridity in the contact zones of empire
• Indigenous voices that have been silenced in the historical and archaeological records

Papers must be original, unpublished works authored by current graduate students. Please send an abstract (no more than 300 words), a paper title, and a C.V. in PDF (.pdf) format to Michelle Heeman, Elizabeth Randolph, and Michael Hall at classics@brandeis.edu. Papers should be 15-minutes in length and will be followed by a 5-minute question and answer session. The deadline for submissions is January 1^st, 2020. Selected speakers will be notified by January 15^th for the April 4^th, 2020 conference.

Johns Hopkins University’s first annual Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium.

This will be a new annual two-day event at the Johns Hopkins University main campus in Baltimore, Maryland and it will offer students across the country the chance to disseminate their humanities research on a national scale. Our event will be this spring, April 3^rd and 4^th, 2020 and our application portal is now open. 

This symposium is open to undergraduate students from any two-year or four-year college or university who would like to present their original scholarship in the humanities. We hope to have 400 participants this year and will also be offering a select number of travel grants to help students afford participation. In addition to the multiple panels of student papers and presentations (including original creative works), we will also have a wonderful keynote delivered by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr and multiple professional development panels featuring graduate students and faculty in our humanities departments and centers. Students studying all areas of the humanities are welcome to attend.

Applications Due: January 24
Early Registration: February 21 ($265)
Registration: March 6 ($285)

You can learn more at our conference site: https://krieger.jhu.edu/macksey-symposium/. If you would like to receive updates on the symposium, our mailing list is available at this link.

The Center for Ancient Studies at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to announce the 2020 graduate conference,  “Movement, Mobility, and the Journey: Ancient Actions and Perspectives”  to be held Friday, February 28 – Saturday, February 29, 2020, on the University of Pennsylvania campus (Philadelphia, PA, USA)

People are in motion in many ways: in their daily lives, in mass migrations, and in chains of interactions involving places, things, and other people.  Motion embodies a multiplicity of action, resulting in creation, exchange, and the production and consumption of energy, amongst countless possibilities.  To conceptualize motion in the ancient world, many routes of study can be utilized to answer questions such as how do ancient perceptions of motion affect human action?  In what ways did movement lead to the establishment of place?  How are concepts of motion, such as the “journey” and “pilgrimage” employed in ancient literature?  How do things or people facilitate movement? 

This conference is open to graduate students and early career scholars and will showcase a wide variety of papers which focus on two main aspects of motion: the physical motion of people, places, and things, and the concept of motion in ancient cultures.  Submissions from all disciplines regarding the ancient world are welcomed with reference to the following broader themes:

●       Motion and travel in ancient text and literature
●       Human movement in the ancient world
●       Pathways, waterways, roads, and trails through both local and large-scale environments
●       Journeys, pilgrimages, and migration events – including the movement of objects, plants, and animals with or via their human counterparts.
●       Displays of motion and movement visually and symbolically
●       Revolutionary technologies of transportation and their effects on ancient society
●       Modern methods of understanding ancient mobility, such as remote sensing, experimental archaeology, isotope analysis, etc.

Please submit a title, an abstract (limit: 250 words), and a current CV in a single email to cas.upenn@gmail.com by Sunday, December 10, 2019.  Presentations should be no more than twenty minutes in length. Accepted participants will be notified by January 10, 2020.  Limited travel funds are available through the Center.

Chronika is an interdisciplinary, open access journal for graduate students studying the art and archaeology of the Mediterranean and European world. Chronika, like its parent organization the Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology (www.iema.buffalo.edu), encourages interdisciplinary dialogues and innovative approaches to the study of the past.

Call for Submissions
Chronikawelcomes submissions from graduate students that address topics relevant to European and Mediterranean archaeology. Articles must be 3,000 to 4,000 words in length, should detail research at or above the Masters level, and may include up to ten images.To have your article considered for this year’s publication, please submit a 100 to 200 word abstract to chronika@buffalo.edu by Monday, November 5^th, 2019. You will be notified if your article is selected by November 9^th. The publication schedule will proceed as follows:

December 6: First draft of full article is due.
December 27: Article is returned to author with comments.
February 7: Revised article is due.
Early April: Chronika launches in print and online. A hard copy is mailed to each author shortly after this time.

Thank you for your interest in Chronika, we look forward to receiving your submission. Please direct any inquiries to chronika@buffalo.edu.

Mélanie Lacan
Editor in Chief

Please visit Chronika on the web at www.chronikajournal.com

The Graduate Visual Culture Association of Queen’s University
Context and Meaning XIX: Hindsight 20/20

We are pleased to announce the 19th annual Context & Meaning Graduate Student Conference, taking place at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, from Friday, January 24th to Saturday, January 25th, 2020. We are seeking proposals for research papers, artworks, and/or participatory projects that address this year’s theme, Hindsight 20/20. The conference will provide an inclusive forum that facilitates multi-disciplinary academic discussion on visual material culture while encompassing an abundant range of topics. Hindsight 20/20 reflects on our engagement with the past and our visions for the future. This conference asks, how do contextualized perspectives influence our understanding of non-linear ways of knowing, and cultural production/output?  

Some potential themes and ideas to consider may include:

• The relationship between time, art conservation, and changing perspectives (cradle supports, synthetic papers, and fresco removals)
• Influence of evolving technologies for art, art history and art conservation research and methods (photography, photogrammetry, new media, VHS)
• Positionality in hindsight: ways of seeing/knowing, shifts in perspective and the period eye, reworked theories, culture, information, politics, the definition of eras, pedagogy 
• Physical examples of anachronisms within visual culture, such as in The Arts and Craft movement and Gothic Revival
• How do artistic practices express current and future ways of knowing? Including, but not limited to, appropriating the past to reinventing the future and limitations within periods of production
• Utopias and the apocalypse (millenarian events, preparing for the future and learning from the past)  
• Art conservation treatments we would do differently today

We encourage applications from graduate students working in Art History, Art Conservation, Studio Art, Digital Humanities, Cultural Studies, Museum Studies, Religious Studies, Gender Studies, as well as students from other Humanities fields whose research responds to this year’s theme. This conference is open to both historical and contemporary topics. Submissions are welcome from current graduate students, as well as those who have completed their graduate studies within the last year. We seek to assemble a diverse group of scholars in order to foster interdisciplinary discussions. Presenters will be allotted 20 minutes to deliver their ideas, followed by a 10-minute discussion period. 

If you are interested in participating in Context and Meaning XIX, please email an abstract of no more than 300 words with the title of your paper, along with a separate document that includes a 250-word bio, to gvca@queensu.ca. Please ensure that your name and the title of your paper are included in your bio and on your abstract. The deadline to submit an abstract will be Friday, November 15th, 2019.Thank you to all who apply! 

Graduate Student Conference Committee
Abby Berry, Amelia Glancy, Natalie Hume, Madeline Legg, and Tessa Wilson
gvca@queensu.ca   

Graduate Visual Culture Association
Department of Art History and Art Conservation                     
Ontario Hall, Queen’s University
Kingston, ON  K7L 3N6 
Canada   

Call for Papers
The 2020 University of Colorado Boulder Classics Graduate Colloquium: Space and Spectacle in Antiquity
Friday, January 31 – Saturday, February 1, 2020

Keynote address by Sarah Levin-Richardson, University of Washington

In antiquity as today, the circumscription of space, real or imagined, dictated how individuals and groups perceived and reacted to their environment. Politicians, architects, artists, and writers manipulated space as a means of directing responses from their ‘audiences,’ creating artificial environments to help guide experience; viewer response to these surroundings in turn informed the construction of later structures. Spaces built for spectacle are good examples of such environments: they are meant to affect a broader public, and also seek to produce a focused viewer experience. In consequence they enforce the reciprocity of this culture-defining process.

This colloquium will thus explore the relationship between space and spectacle and social and cultural experience. We welcome submissions from graduate students working in any discipline that helps inform our understanding of the ancient world; interdisciplinary approaches too are very welcome. We are interested in topics that consider the manufactured nature of space and spectacle and hope to foster discussion on topics that include but need not be limited to the articulation of space in public buildings; the relationship between spectacle and text; ritual or political performance; and literary ekphrasis. Papers may explore these phenomena as they manifest in any geographical area of the ancient Mediterranean and its surrounding regions, including Egypt, the Near East, Anatolia, Byzantium, the Levant, and the further expanses of the Roman Empire. We are particularly interested in those topics that fall into lesser studied periods.

Relevant areas in which we welcome submissions include:
-Religious performances (ritual, processions, sacrifices, divination, etc.)
-Performance of politics (public works, oratory, triumphs)
-Athletics and spectacle (gladiatorial combat, amphitheaters, circuses)
-Musical performance
-Ceremony in its literary contexts
-Tragedy, comedy, and mime, especially of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods and in the provinces

Please submit abstracts via email to calliope@colorado.edu by September 1, 2019, with the subject line “Boulder Classics Graduate Colloquium 2020 Submission.” Abstracts should include a title for the paper and be anonymous PDF files, no longer than 300 words. Please include your name, institution, and the title of your abstract in the body of your email. Presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes.

Questions about the conference should be submitted to the same email address.

Rome and Iberia.
Diversity of Relations from Antiquity to Modernity.

April 25-26, 2019
The Department of Spanish Studies and the Department of Classical Philology of the University in Lodz would like to invite you to the second interdisciplinary academic conference.
While the Roman conquest was not the beginning of the Iberian Peninsula history, Roman presence in the region profoundly affected the lives of its inhabitants. Those relations left a permanent mark on the Peninsula and the vestiges of Ancient Roman culture still abound not only there, but also in other countries which came under Iberian influence. This issue is still avidly researched and debated by scholars of different fields.
The Second Interdisciplinary Conference is an opportunity for Polish and international speakers, considering and analyzing the issue from a variety of perspectives, to exchange research experience. We anticipate speeches on such interesting topics as the correlations between Latin and Romance languages, for instance Spanish and Portuguese. Also expected to attend are scholars who will address the issue of, for example, the image of the Peninsula in the Latin literature of the Roman and subsequent periods, as well as the depiction of Ancient Rome as a source of inspiration in Spanish and Portuguese writings. We also extend a warm welcome to historians, art scholars and archeologists, as the remnants of the joint heritage of Rome and Iberia are to be found both in literature and in material culture.
See the attached Call for Papers

International Open Workshop:
Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the Last 15,000 Years: The Creation of Landscapes VI
March 11-16, 2019 in Kiel, Germany
http://www.workshop-gshdl.uni-kiel.de/
Call for papers
Session 11 :
Social resilience to climate changes with perspectives on the past 5000 years
Session conveners:
Liang Emlyn Yang, Mara Weinelt, Joana Seguin, Ingmar Unkel, Jutta Kneisel, Artur Ribeiro
During the past few decades, many studies have highlighted periods when significant climatic changes coincided with social upheavals. However, fewer studies have discussed periods of social stability or prosperity when faced with climate risks. The concept of social resilience has gradually become an important topic in scientific communities (e.g. Climatology, Geography, Socio-ecology, Geo-archaeology, Sustainability). It refers to the capability of a human social system to cope with stresses, maintain its function and evolve into a more sustainable society with respect to climate stresses. In fact, increasing studies are suggesting that societies continued to settle and develop in hazard-prone areas and periods.
The overall aim of this session is to understand different cases, manifestations, and changes of social resilience to climate impacts from pre-historic, historical and contemporary perspectives, from local to global perspectives, and from theoretical, empirical as well as quantitative modelling perspectives. Specifically, the session will discuss the following questions (but not limited to):

• What are typical cases of social resilience to climate changes in past societies?
• What are the key factors and features for a social system to be resilient in face of climate variation?
• How was resilience performed in key societal sectors, e.g. agriculture, nomadism, livelihood, urbanization or population development?
• How can social resilience to climate changes be quantified, evaluated, modeled or simulated?
• What kind of changes and evolution of social resilience to climate changes could be observed?
• What are the scope, thresholds, and tipping points of social resilience to climate changes?
• What can we learn from the experience and lessons of the past resilient and/or “un-resilient” cases? Are these learnings up-scalable to explanatory theories?
• What could be the pathways, measures, strategies and priorities for building social resilience in present societies?

We aim to reach a big session of around 20 presentations and propose to publish a Special Issue of 12-15 full papers in a scientific journal that captures the variety of subjects and approaches discussed in this session. Upon specific requests, we may consider partly covering the participating costs of those who submit qualified full papers.
The abstract submission deadline is November 30, 2018. Please go to the conference website http://www.workshop-gshdl.uni-kiel.de to register and submit, and also inform the conveners about your intention of full paper submission. First version of full papers is due a week before the conference, i.e. by March 04, 2019. A target journal and other issues are to be discussed with all participants during the workshop.