Deadline for proposals: September 13
Notification of Acceptance: September 30
Deadline for final seminar papers: October 25
The seminar papers will be commented on by the senior researchers and professors of the Centre. Additionally, our confirmed visiting scholars commenting on the workshop papers this year are Professor Dorothee Birke and Professor Ruth Page.
Proposals: We ask prospective participants to submit a proposal for a paper to be presented at the seminar. The one-page proposal should include: title, research question, target material, method and theoretical framework plus a short description of the issues the author would like the seminar to address when discussing their paper. The language of the proposals and the seminar is English.
Seminar papers & presentations: Those selected to present at the seminar are expected to send in written papers to be discussed. Papers should include an extended version (2 to 3 pages) of the proposal and a representative excerpt (2 to 3 pages) of their target material. In case the original target material is in any other language than English, we ask for you to provide a short sample (for example half-a-page) of the material translated to English. On the day of the seminar, participants are expected to present their papers briefly (max. 5 minutes) before comments and discussion.
The seminar will be held on site at Tampere University in Finland. If there is room in the program, a hybrid panel with some of the PhD participants online can be organized. Please indicate clearly in your application if you can only participate online.
Apply by sending your proposal to Nanna Numento (nanna.numento@tuni.fi) by September 13. Notifications of acceptance will go out by September 30. The deadline for the final seminar papers is October 25.
Visiting scholars:
Dorothee Birke is Professor of Anglophone literatures at the University of Innsbruck, Austria and works on both the contemporary and the eighteenth-century British novel. She is interested in the question of how narrative presents in and responds to particular media ecologies and their material, economical and social configurations. Her engagement with narrative theory began with her PhD dissertation Memory’s Fragile Power: Crises of Memory, Identity and Narrative (published in 2008). Her second book, Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice (published 2016) then asked how novels in different periods have explicitly and implicitly promoted particular ideas and ideals about reading as a changing practice. Many of her current interests have developed from this project: most prominently, her work on how practitioners on social media platforms such as BookTok and BookTube represent and perform their practices and identities as readers of narrative fiction. She also continues to be interested in paratext, in representations of the digital in contemporary fiction and in more broadly in reception also in other media, particularly the theatre. Dorothee’s articles have been published in journals such as Narrative, Poetics Today, Style, Journal of Popular Culture, and Language and Literature. Currently she serves as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative.
Ruth Page is Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. She has written several books including Narratives Online: Shared Stories and Social Media (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction (London & NY: Routledge, 2012). Her publications have explored narratives and multimodal communication in a wide range of mediated contexts. She was the lead researcher for the ESRC funded project: Influencer Stories of Mental Health and Young People: https://influencerstories.bham.ac.uk/, which examined mental health narratives from influencers in TikTok and produced a range of resources to help educators, policy makers, parents and carers and young people. She is currently co-authoring a book with Professor Alexandra Georgakopoulou on memetic storytelling in TikTok (forthcoming, Palgrave MacMillan). She regards herself as an intellectual magpie, bridge-builder and enjoys learning about the ways storytelling is evolving in our fast-changing digital landscape.
For further information contact Nanna Numento (nanna.numento@tuni.fi)