Speakers now confirmed!

We will shortly be announcing the programme for the day, but in the meantime we are delighted to announce below the names of our speakers and the titles of their papers:

Imogen Clarke (University of Roehampton) – Rescuing Newton: The Careful Management of a Revolution in Science

Harry Gregory (University of York) – Tin Tabernacles and Religious Expansion in the Late Nineteenth-Century

Katharina Günther (University of Cologne) – Aesthetics of Transparency – Francis Bacon and X-Ray Photography

Ian Higgins (University of Leicester) – ‘This Strange Disease of Modern Life’: Boredom, Flux and the Making of Modernity

Helen Kearney  (Royal College of Art) –Mapping Modernity: The London Postal Map

Gaetan Maret (University of Oxford) – Literary Travels of the Harlem Renaissance

Antonino L. Nielfi  (University of Melbourne) – Swirls of Shouts and Rivers of Shapes: Futurism’s Dual Gaze on Early Twentieth-Century Society

Christopher Phillips (University of Leeds) – Remembering the Third ‘M’

Fariha Shaikh (King’s College London) – ‘An Imagined Community’? The Social Life of Nineteenth-Century Emigrant Shipboard Newspapers

Registration now open!

Registration for the conference is now open – please fill in the form underneath the ‘Registration’ tab if you would like to attend. Registration is free and all food and drink on the day will be provided.

We are happy to help with any queries regarding travel or accommodation; please feel free to email us regarding this. The conference will start at 9.15am and we anticipate that it will finish at 17:45pm, for those of you booking trains.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Keynote speaker – Dr Matthew Rubery

We are very pleased to announce that our keynote speaker at ‘in:flux – 1845-1945: A Century in Motion’ will be Dr Matthew Rubery of Queen Mary, University of London. Dr Rubery’s talk is entitled ‘Reading on the Move after 1877’ and he will be discussing the following:

‘Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. From the phonograph’s
first utterance, observers were powerfully drawn to the notion of a new
kind of book existing in recorded form, to be heard rather than read.
This talk documents a series of hypothetical mechanical reading devices
developed by advocates for the blind, engineers, futurists, utopianists,
and novelists in response to Edison’s invention. Chief among them was a
portable phonographic reading machine that, nearly a century ahead of
the Walkman, would entertain a distinctly modern group of urban
commuters who welcomed the opportunity for reading on the move.’

Further information about Dr Rubery’s research interests and publications can be found here: http://www.sed.qmul.ac.uk/staff/ruberym.html

We hope you will join us for what promises to be a fascinating keynote!

 

 

One week to go

There is now only a week left to submit your abstract before our Call for Papers closes next Friday. We have already received some very interesting proposals and the day is promising to be a very exciting and truly interdisciplinary event. To get involved don’t forget to send an abstract and short bio to us by Friday 17th!

Only a fortnight left!

There are now only two weeks left until our call for papers closes on Friday 17th May! If you are interested in presenting a paper, please send an abstract and short bio to pgculturalmodernity@contacts.bham.ac.uk. You can also keep up to date with all the latest news by following us on Twitter @pgculturalmod and liking our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pgculturalmod. If you are interested in attending without presenting a paper, please look out for when registration opens towards the end of May. The conference will be a free event and all are welcome.

Call For Papers now open!

We are pleased to announce that our call for papers is now open! Please send abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers along with a short biographical note of no more than 50 words to pgculturalmodernity@contacts.bham.ac.uk by 17th May 2013. For further information about the scope and themes of the conference, please see our Call for Papers page. We particularly welcome proposals which are interdisciplinary in nature or explore crossovers between suggested topics. As a conference hosted by the College of Arts and Law we are keen to include a range of papers broadly representative of the disciplines that the College encompasses, which include: English; Drama; American and Canadian Studies; History and Art History; Philosophy; Theology and Religion; Music; Languages; and Law.

 

 

 

in:flux 1845-1945: A Century in Motion

‘in:flux 1845-1945: A Century in Motion’ is the first annual conference organised by the postgraduate contingent of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity, at the University of Birmingham. It will be taking place at the University on 27th June 2013. Please use the headings above for further information.