Revised CFP (October 2021): HIDDEN NABOKOV (June 15-19 2022, Wellesley)

**Update: Register here!**

Call for Papers:  HIDDEN NABOKOV

(June 15-19, 2022, Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA)

We are delighted to announce the (rescheduled!) first major international conference on Nabokov in North America in over two decades. Hidden Nabokov will take place in-person only at Wellesley College, where Vladimir Nabokov began his academic career with two weeks of lectures in April 1941 and then taught for the next six years. The conference is sponsored by the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, Wellesley College, and the Nabokov Literary Foundation, with additional support from other universities in the United States. It will feature two to three full days of non-simultaneous scholarly panels; a poster session; an opening reception, keynote addresses, banquet, and additional programming; opportunities for excursions to Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and other sites in the Boston area associated with Nabokov; and a special one-of-a-kind Nabokovian event to be announced shortly.

Reasonably priced accommodations on the Wellesley campus will be available to attendees, and there will be a limited number of travel grants for graduate students, unaffiliated scholars, and international scholars with limited funding.  Participants should be members of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society at the time of the conference. (Please visit this page to join. The INVS offers reduced rates for students and retired or under-employed scholars as well as sponsored memberships, especially for those from economically distressed parts of the world. It also awards several annual prizes for scholarship on Nabokov and provides special members-only features on the Society’s website.)

New: Submission of complete themed panels is allowed, but these may be divided by the review committee. There will also be a poster session; poster submissions are welcomed, and some papers that cannot be accommodated in the regular format will be invited within the poster framework. (Posters will entail pre-circulating and hanging an entire paper for open review and discussion, in a common space at a set time; details to follow).

Join us in discovering new, hidden, or relatively unexplored facets of Vladimir Nabokov’s life and art, including (but not limited to) the following topics:

masks, costumes, clothing, disguises

body parts, private parts

aliases, pseudonyms, codes, cryptograms

observation, voyeurism, eavesdropping, espionage, detection

secrecy, privacy, the problem of sincerity and the hidden self

racial, sexual, or gendered identities and performances

the unseen, unheard, unspoken, unnamed, or overlooked

observing, identifying, and classifying previously unknown phenomena

discovering and exploring new worlds

gnosticism, spiritualism, and the otherworld

the unconscious and the forgotten

feints, obliquities, and strategic omissions

closets, tunnels, and hiding places

neglected works, genres, themes, or aspects of Nabokov

Please submit a 250-word (maximum) abstract by email  (with “Hidden VN Submission” as the subject heading) to ssweeney@holycross.edu by midnight on Monday, Nov. 1, 2021. We also welcome any questions you might have about the conference, the travel grants, or the IVNS.

Hidden Nabokov Conference Organizing Committee:

Stephen Blackwell, University of Tennessee (sblackwe@utk.edu)

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, College of the Holy Cross (ssweeney@holycross.edu)

Adam Weiner, Wellesley College (aweiner@wellesley.edu)