Please note that the deadline for submissions for the inaugural issue of New Scholar: An International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences has been extended to September 14, 2010. The CFP and other information can be found at www.newscholar.org.au.

Dear ASAL members,

Hopefully you have had the opportunity to read the Teaching Australian Literature report that was released in July this year. The TAL project has now established a forum for collecting feedback and comments. The forum can be found at: http://teaching.austlit.edu.au/?q=talsurveyforum.

So please post your responses to this important report and help to generate discussion around the important issues it raises.

The report itself can be found at: http://www.altc.edu.au/resource-teaching-australian-literature-survey-utas-2010.

Paul Genoni

President, ASAL

THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY

SHARP Brisbane

28-30 April 2011

The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

The twentieth century began in the midst of one print revolution and ended in the midst of another. This conference aims to bring together research on topics in book history, publishing studies, media studies and histories of reading from across the “long twentieth century”-from the closing decades of the nineteenth century to the opening decade of the twenty-first. It will look back from the digital age to the print and broadcast revolutions of the twentieth century, and examine the diverse experiences of print modernity across the globe.

Dramatic developments in publishing in the late nineteenth century coincided with equally dramatic changes in the nature of authorship, reading practices, print markets, education, and the international trade in books. The rapid expansion of print culture was central to the transnational experience of modernity, and deeply enmeshed in the rise of distinctively modern forms of entertainment, consumption and communication. Perhaps only now do we find a comparable moment of change and challenge. The digital age has signaled a new print revolution. Once again, the international trade in print and intellectual property is at stake in a globalised market and mediascape. Once again, publishing, reading and writing find themselves refigured by powerful new technologies, and previously unimagined forms of communication and entertainment. Once again, the language of crisis is all about us, as the complexion of the book is renewed amidst new cultural forms and formations.

The Long Twentieth Century seeks proposals for 20-minute papers and 90-minute panel sessions on any aspect of book history or print culture studies addressing the conference theme. Possible topics include:

• “Modern books” and “modern readers”-print cultures and modernity
• The print diaspora-colonial and postcolonial book and readers
• Asian modernities-print and digital revolutions in Japan, China, India and beyond
• From print technologies to reading devices-transformations of the book
• Print and screen cultures-aesthetics, adaptation, convergence
• High, popular and middlebrow cultures-the democratization of book talk
• Bestseller lists, literary prizes, and “modern classics”-new definitions of literary value
• Books and government-policy, piracy and intellectual property
• The “business of books”-globalization and changing industry structures
• Institutions and instruction-histories of literary education
• Redefining periodical cultures-newspapers, magazines, blogs and digital time
• Transformations in the “world republic of letters”-cultures, careers, corporations
• “Deprovincializing Europe”-local, national, transnational histories of books and reading
• Web archives and libraries-the ideal of a universal library and the politics of digital reproduction

Papers addressing book history in Asia, Africa, and post-colonial cultures are especially welcomed, alongside those addressing Anglo-American, European, and Australasian contexts.

Please submit abstracts to the conference conveners at UQSHARP2011@gmail.com by 1 November 2010.

See here for a pdf version of the call for papers.

Dear ASAL 2010 delegates

We are writing to invite conference presenters to submit papers for the JASAL Special Issue on Archive Madness. Papers need to be submitted to JASAL by 10 January 2010.

Postgraduate students who wish to submit their essays to the A.D. Hope prize should follow the same process and include details of their postgraduate status with their essays.

The JASAL site should be consulted for information regarding submission.

We are very excited about this publication given the wonderful work presented at the conference.

Best wishes

New Scholar: An International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences

New Scholar is is a peer-reviewed online journal of emerging scholarship and intellectual practice from the humanities, creative arts and social sciences. Based in Australia, but with international scope, the journal has a particular focus on new scholarship: work by ‘early career researchers’ as well as innovative or even radical interventions from more established scholars. New Scholar encourages original approaches to disciplinary methodologies, as well as interdisciplinary scholarship and the breaking down of traditional disciplinary boundaries. New Scholar also encourages creative scholarly works. The journal aims to facilitate scholarly exchange and the strengthening of
international research communities.

The editors of New Scholar invite submissions for the inaugural issue, the theme of which is ‘New Scholarship?’ The question mark after the phrase ‘New Scholarship’ signals the central problematic of the issue: what counts as ‘new scholarship,’ who gets to say so and on what basis? This issue will examine claims for originality within contemporary contexts for intellectual practice. It will provide a space for investigations of the power structures that frame scholarship, the institutionalisation of scholarly authority and the necessarily circumscribed nature of innovation.

For more information and a pdf of the cfp click here.