Arts Faculty News

How do I look? Aesthetics Through Theory

Thursday 10 and Friday 11 December
Keynote speaker: Dr Alison Ross
Featuring a screening of the film Examined Life

The Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies organises an annual postgraduate colloquium, where postgraduate students from the Centre and the wider Faculty are able to share ideas. The colloquium is an opportunity for postgraduate students and emerging scholars, conducting research in literary studies, cultural studies or critical theory, to present aspects of their work. The colloquium seeks to provide a forum for stimulating academic exchange in a relaxed and supportive atmosphere. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

The title of this year’s colloquium will be ‘How Do I Look? – Aesthetics through Theory’. While contemporary research in the humanities considers a broad range of questions, aesthetics arguably remains a central concern for us all. The organisers invite potential participants to reflect on their own research with regard to contemporary considerations of aesthetics. The overall intention remains the sharing of original ideas and research; accordingly, participants are under no obligation to narrow their focus.

Prospective participants are invited to present a paper of 25–30 minutes length (plus discussion). Proposals should be emailed to colloquium09@arts.monash.edu.au by 30th October. Please include a title and an abstract of 100–150 words. Presentations incorporating audiovisual media are welcome. Please mention any technical requirements and preferences as to date and time.

Further information is available on the CCLCS Postgraduate Colloquium page.

Changing the Climate: 4th Utopias Conference

Changing the Climate: 4th Utopias Conference invites papers from scholars, writers and others interested in the interplay between ecology and ecocriticism, utopia, dystopia and science fiction.

This conference will directly address the questions of dystopia and catastrophe with special reference to a problem that increasingly haunts our imaginings of the future, that of actual or possible environmental catastrophe. As Jameson himself wrote in The Seeds of Time: ‘It seems … easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations’. Hopefully, this conference will play some small part in changing that particular climate of opinion.

Its keynote speakers will be:

• Tom Moylan, author of Demand the Impossible (1986), Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000) and Dark Horizons (2003)
• Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Antarctica (1997) and the Science in the Capital Trilogy – Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007).

Full information on submitting papers and registration is available on the conference site.

Dr Carlo Salzani

Dr Carlo Salzani has been awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship.

Dr Salzani completed a PhD in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies on ‘Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality’ in 2007.

The fellowships are offered world-wide on a competitive basis. The most important criteria for selection are the applicant’s publications and the quality and feasibility of their research proposal. This is the second Humboldt Fellowship to have been awarded to a Centre graduate in the last three years.