Updated Call for Papers: HIDDEN NABOKOV
(Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA, late summer or fall 2021)
Hidden Nabokov, the first major international Nabokov conference in North America in over two decades, will take place at Wellesley College, where 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 Foundation, with support from other universities. It includes three full days of scholarly panels; an opening reception, keynote addresses, banquet, and additional programming; and opportunities for excursions to Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and other Nabokovian sites near Boston.
As a special event, the conference will feature the world première of one of Nabokov’s first major works: his verse play, The Tragedy of Mister Morn, recently translated by Thomas Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy, which will be staged by the Wellesley Repertory Theatre, an award-winning professional company in residence at Wellesley College.
Due to the global pandemic, Hidden Nabokov will be delayed until at least late summer or fall 2021. Accordingly, the deadline for submitting abstracts has been extended until January 1, 2021. A number of partial travel grants for graduate students are available (and some funding will also be available separately from the IVNS for less-funded scholars from the US and abroad). Participants should be members of the IVNS at the time of the conference. (Please visit http://thenabokovian.org/become-member to join. 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 annual prizes for Nabokov scholarship.)
Join us in discovering new, hidden, or relatively unexplored facets of 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 themes, genres, and works, including The Tragedy of Mister Morn
Updated deadline. Please submit a 250-word abstract by email (with “Hidden VN Submission” as the subject heading) to ssweeney@holycross.edu by midnight on Friday, Jan. 1, 2021. We welcome any questions you might have about the conference, the travel grants, and 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)
Comments