University of Reading, United Kingdom

Friday 19 February 2010

Keynote speakers: Professor Brian Jenkins (Leeds) and Professor Mary Bryden (Reading)

CALL FOR PAPERS For individuals, communities or other subsidiaries nation, nationhood and nationalism are subject to a variety of morphologies. While normally associated with conservative political terrain, such concepts are interiorized, adapted, mutated, discarded, or internally disputed in multiple ways across many ideological divides.

Evidence of these morphologies is to be found in political, literary, philosophical and other discourses, providing contexts in which debates unfold concerning customs, laws, religions, languages, generations, regions, and micro-cultures.

They underpin controversies over the relationship of the individual to the collective.

They are woven into the tensions that affect the relationship between ethnic and racial groups and universalist notions of humanity or human rights.

They are especially crucial in the context of war, becoming fixed or mutating according to a variety of pressures.

They inspire both anti-Semitic and anti-clerical propaganda.

They inform reaction to emerging identities in the era of postcolonialism and in the context of an ever-expanding European Union.

They reach not only into the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, but also back to pre-revolutionary Europe, and even concern the Middle Ages which prove a rich source of national or international paradigms in the modern period.

The aim of this conference will be to bring together especially early-career researchers for one day to dialogue on these and related themes.

Post-doctoral researchers, postgraduate students and other interested researchers in French, German and Italian Studies are invited to submit proposals for this conference (200 words max.) by 27th November 2009 to

Dr Brian Sudlow: b.j.sudlow@rdg.ac.uk