If your PhD project involves studying narrative or if you make use of narrative methods, this announcement is for you. On Friday November 17, 2023, Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies hosts its seventh annual seminar for PhD students. The seminar provides a chance to meet PhD researchers from diverse backgrounds who work on or with narrative, but also to participate in Narrare’s ongoing endeavor of developing theories, methods, and analytical tools for the field of interdisciplinary narrative studies.
The seminar papers will be commented on by the senior researchers and professors of the Centre. Our confirmed visiting scholars commenting on the workshop papers this year are Professor Dorien Van De Mieroop and Professor Markku Lehtimäki.
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. 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.
Please apply by sending your proposal to Markus Laukkanen (markus.laukkanen@tuni.fi) by September 15. The deadline for the final seminar papers is November 3.
Visiting scholars:
Dorien Van De Mieroop is a Professor of Linguistics at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her main research interests lie in the discursive analysis of identity in institutional interactions and narratives, about which she published more than 50 articles in international peer-reviewed journals and co-authored or co-edited a few books and special issues (e.g. ‘The language of leadership narratives’ (2020, with Jonathan Clifton and Stephanie Schnurr), ‘Identity struggles’ (2017, with Stephanie Schnurr), and ‘Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves’ (2016, with Jonathan Clifton)). She is co-editor of the journal Narrative Inquiry.
See: https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/midi/members/dorienvandemieroop for more information.
Markku Lehtimäki, Ph.D., is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, Finland. His fields of expertise are narrative theory, visual culture, ecocriticism, and American literature. His research projects include The Changing Environment of the North: Cultural Representations and Uses of Water (2017–2021), funded by the Academy of Finland, and The Novel’s Knowledge: Changing Roles of Author and Book in Society (2022–2024), funded by the Kone Foundation. His is the author of The Poetics of Norman Mailer’s Nonfiction: Self-Reflexivity, Literary Form, and the Rhetoric of Narrative (2005) and Sofi Oksasen romaanitaide: Kertomus, etiikka, retoriikka (“The Art of Sofi Oksanen’s Novels: Narrative, Ethics, Rhetoric”, 2022) and co-editor of several books, most recently Visual Representations of the Arctic: Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature and Politics (2021) and Cold Waters: Tangible and Symbolic Seascapes of the North (2022).
For further information contact: markus.laukkanen@tuni.fi
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