CfP: “War, the Body, and Communities”, German Studies Association 2018; “War and Violence Network”

War experiences and legacies affect individual bodies and broader communities. War violates and traumatizes bodies as it simultaneously destroys and builds communities. War contributes different narratives about the body and communities in relation to conflict and violence. Our panel series explores themes that includes the forming and disciplining of bodies for war, the disfiguration of bodies during war, “disembodied” contemporary warfare, and the disappearances of the body during war. The body can carry the actual scars of violence and become a metaphor for the terrain of pain. The body can be a weapon as well as a victim of war; it can execute, document, archive, aesthetize, and politicize war. Wartime communities can develop from the idea of a shared “bodily” wartime experience. Communities represent a dynamic entity constructed by common encounters, attitudes, and emotions and can include victims, mourners, widows, protesters, veterans, survivors, perpetrators; and their respective representations, experiences, and negotiations with their own (or other) bodies. Papers could explore how war can build and undermine “war communities” and how aesthetic and historical works about war can shape a sense of community. Proposals can address the topic in the time span from the Medieval Ages to today.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Militarizing bodies and shaping collectives
War wounds and victims, broken bodies, refugees
The image of the war hero and its role in nation building
War, fashion and uniforms, rationing and consumption
Sensing war, War and ecstasy
Literary works on war, body, and communities
Search for bodies and missing communities
Gender and the body and gendering (war) communities
Visual renderings and experience-making – enactments, films, monuments, memorials

We invite proposals that address research associated with the body and/or community within the German context. Such fields as History, Literary and Media Studies, Art and Cultural History, Visual, Film and Museum Studies, Musicology, Gender Studies and other disciplines.

Please note two important GSA rules: All panel participants including the commentator and moderator must be registered GSA members by February 10, 2017. No individual at the GSA Conference may give more than one paper/participate in a seminar or participate in more than two separate capacities.

Please send abstracts, brief c.v., and AV requests, if applicable, by Jan. 19, 2018 to both network coordinators Katherine Aaslestad (Katherine.Aaslestad@mail.wvu.edu) and Kathrin Maurer (kamau@sdu.dk) who will review paper proposals. All applicants will be informed by late January. This allows proposals which cannot be included in the network panels to be submitted directly to the GSA by the overall deadline of February, 15 2018.

Dancing in the Shadow of the First World War

Dancing in the Shadow of the First World War
10:30am – 5pm, Saturday 29 November 2014
London College of Fashion

The Society for Dance Research is holding a one day symposium that explores dance during the First World War. Its impact on the political, social and economic histories of the Twentieth Century has often been explored but what was its significance for dance? This exciting day will open dialogues on a particularly under-researched area in dance history and provide new insights into dance’s complex relationship with events and values of the World War One era.

The symposium will feature a keynote speech by Theresa Buckland, Professor of Dance History and Ethnography, University of Roehampton on the topic of ‘Popular Dancing Around the First World War’. This will be followed by papers by Ramsay Burt, Charlotte Ewart, Nicole Haitzinger, Michael Huxley, Carole Kew, Dana Mills, Larraine Nicholas, Jane Pritchard, and Marianne Schultz on topics that will include: the patriotic dance programming in London during the war; the war’s influence on artists such as Isadora Duncan, Wassily Kandinsky, Léonide Massine and Pablo Picasso; and the influences and preoccupations of social dance forms.

Fee:
Society for Dance Research members: Free
Waged: £25
Unwaged: £15

For more information and how to register please visit:
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dancing-in-the-shadow-of-the-first-world-war-tickets-13655731661

Venue: RHS West JPS133 (Room), London College of Fashion, John Prince’s Street, London W1G 0BJ
Registration and sale of tickets for this event will close on Monday 24 November.