Category Archives: conference

CFP: The Face and/in World Literature

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Together with Professor Anca Parvulescu from Washington University in St. Louis, we are delighted to put together a co-hosted seminar proposal for next year’s American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) conference.

We currently seek paper proposals for a seminar on ‘The Face and/in World Literature.’

Beginning October 1 (and due October 31) interested individuals may submit a paper proposal to ONE seminar of their choice. Potential seminar organizers will then have the opportunity to select the papers they would like to include in their seminar and submit a complete seminar to the ACLA for approval.

Please see the ACLA call page here to submit a paper proposal. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our proposed seminar brings together scholars working in a range of fields to frame a comparative literary history of the face. From Chaucer through to the contemporary global novel, the seminar considers changing literary and textual discourses about the human face alongside the cultural history of face reading. Working across literary geographies, genres and historical periods, papers and conversations will consider a range of imaginative representations of the face and the conventions that frame such representations. Adjacent fields through which an analysis of the face might be engaged include philosophy, sociology, linguistics, cultural theory, art history, and the history of science. The seminar aims to illuminate the relationship between literature and the long history of social and cultural understandings of the face and allow us to better understand contemporary transformations at the intersection of physiognomy, affect, and, increasingly, technology. We hope this history will offer new perspectives on recent developments in facial recognition surveillance and affect detection technologies, social media practices, and the way in which we increasingly use the face as a social commodity.

Possible topics include:

–literary histories of prosopopoeia

–the portrait and its conventions

–histories of the mask and the veil

–emotion/affect and the face

–physiognomy around the world

–race and the face

–disability and the face

–technologies of facialization 

–theories of interface

–aesthetics and/of the face

–formalisms of the face

–the history of cosmetics and cosmetic surgery

–the face in digital cultures 

–ethics of the face

–comparatism and the face

Disturbed Faces: Conference Program

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We now have a flyer and program for our forthcoming conference: Disturbed Faces (Visages perturbés / Verstörte Gesichter).

Disturbed Faces will be hosted by the literature program at the University of Geneva and the Swiss Association of General and Comparative Literature.

When: 3rd-5th November, 2022 at the University of Geneva

The conference program can be found here!

The Time of the Smile

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We will be speaking about our project at the forthcoming conference of The Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. This year’s conference theme is ‘Reception and Emotion’ and the event will be held online via Zoom (hosted by The University of Western Australia), from 27–30 June 2022!

Our proposed panel will consider the following, across three papers by Stephanie, Joe & Tyne:

In The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris (2014), Colin Jones argued that in the eighteenth century a new kind of smile, the “white-toothed smile” came to replace a “snooty, aggressive, closed-mouth smile” that had been dominant in seventeenth century France. This revolution, he shows, was tied to transformations in the history of emotions, in dentistry, in practices of aesthetic representation, and in the progressive urbanisation of eighteenth-century life. Our panel takes inspiration from Jones’s conjugation of the emotional, the physiological and the socio-historical in the sense of a smile, but we want to expand this field of inquiry. We want to look at other times of the smile: earlier periods in the history of the smile and other times in the arc of the smile (the first movements of a smile, the experience of smiling and being smiled at, of smiling to oneself and to another). The three papers on this panel span medieval and early modern texts, practices of close reading, cultural history and digital methods, in order to deepen the cultural history of the smile. 

CFP: Disturbed Faces

conference, emotion, Geneva, gesture, kinesic, Literature

We’re thrilled to announce the Call For Papers for our trilingual collaborative conference – Disturbed Faces (Visages perturbés / Verstörte Gesichter).

Disturbed Faces will be hosted by the literature program at the University of Geneva and the Swiss Association of General and Comparative Literature.

When: 3rd-5th November, 2022 at the University of Geneva

Call for Papers

The human face is a part of the body as well as a sensorimotor process and an intersubjective and social phenomenon. A bodily place, it is located at the level of the head, but it often manifests the emotional and expressive state of the body as a whole. Sensorimotor process, it causes sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell and kinaesthesia, and this reciprocally: we perceive and we are perceived through our face. It establishes self-awareness as a subject capable of entering into relationship with other living beings. The face attracts our attention at all times, but especially when a health crisis forces us to rethink our way of communicating – masked, from a distance or by interposed screens. 

In literature and the visual arts, the face can be the central element in the construction of characters. The physical aspect, the expressiveness and the modifications of the face manifest emotions and thoughts. The face thus positions the characters in their relationship to others and defines their role and function in the plot. Finally, it allows and establishes the possibility of identification with the characters during the reception. So what happens when this preeminent role is disrupted? How is a disturbed face constructed, represented or thought out and how can it be put into perspective with other forms of relation to the face? What role and what impact does it have on the construction of the characters, on their relationships and on the plot in literary works and the visual arts (comics, cinema, installations)? 

The annual ASLGC colloquium – which will be held from 03 to 05 November 2022 at the University of Geneva in collaboration with the international research project Literature and the Face: A Critical History (Australian Research Council) – aims to explore the representations and constructions of the ‘disturbed face’ in literatures around the world, favoring an approach that is both interdisciplinary and intersemiotic. It thus seeks to bring together literary study, the visual arts and other disciplines in which the face plays an epistemological role (philosophy, sociology, medicine, law), starting from the principle that the face is never given as it is and that it is always constructed in a discursive as well as a semiotic way in the broad sense, in a cognitive and emotional way as well as in a cultural and social way.

Organizing committee

Prof. ass. Evelyn Dueck
Prof. Guillemette Bolens
Prof. Martin Rueff

Terms of participation

The research presented must not have been the subject of a previous publication or communication. Interventions can be given in French, English, Italian or German. The communication proposal (the submission of a one-page summary and a short biography) must reach the organizing committee before January 31, 2022 at the following addresses: 

evelyn.dueck@unige.ch and guillemette.bolens@unige.ch