Copenhagen University, 4-5 December 2015

The Nordic Association for Romantic Studies (NARS) is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the international conference Rethinking Cultural Memory 1700-1850. The conference will take place at Copenhagen University, Denmark, Friday 4 – Saturday 5 December 2015. Deadline for paper proposals is 1 July 2015. Plenary speakers are William St Clair, Ann Rigney, Susanna Petterson and Joep Leerssen.[....]

28-30 October, University of Amsterdam

The workshop Canonization of “Cultural Saints”: Commemorative Cults of Artists and Nation-Building in Europe, convened by Marijan Dović (Institute of Literature ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana) and SPIN, aims to identify and describe patterns in the nationally-motivated veneration of poets, writers, composers, and intellectuals in post-1789 Europe.[....]

SPIN is happy to announce that it has entered into collaboration with H-Nationalism.

H-Nationalism, part of the H-Net forum of Humanities and Social Sciences Online, brings scholars in the field of nationalism studies together across academic and national frontiers and encompasses matters involving theory, methodology, history, and case studies of nationalism, nation formation, national identity, and related topics.[....]

The section "Writings" documents critical writings inspired by cultural nationalism. The section "Pundits at War" contains writings by well-known authors and intellectuals vindicating their country in the various geopolitical conflicts of the 19th century, especially the Schleswig-Holstein Conflict, the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War.

After the upload of new material, the corpus now spans a century from 1813 until 1915, leading from Ernst Moritz Arndt to Emile Durkheim, and includes texts by the likes of Jacob Grimm, Theodor Mommsen, Fustel de Coulanges, Thomas Carlyle, Ernest Renan,and Thomas Mann.

Joep Leerssen’s essay When was Romantic Nationalism? The onset, the long tail, the banal has been published as a pamphlet by our affiliate NISE as the second in their series of "NISE Essays". It is available in print and online.

To order a printed version (free of charge), contact SPIN. A PDF is online and can be downloaded by [[download file="2014-12/whenwasromanticnationalism.pdf" icon="" text="clicking here" title="" ]][....]

The 2014 SPIN lecture was given on Tuesday 25 November by Professor T.A. Shippey.

Tom Shippey, emeritus Professor of Humanities at St. Louis University, is famous among the wider public as the world’s foremost specialist on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and its background in Germanic and Comparative Philology. In the scholarly community, Shippey’s best-known work is on the 19th-century intellectual history of Germanic and Mythological Studies; among his publications in that field are a documentary reception study of Beowulf (Beowulf: The Critical Heritage, with Andreas Haarder) and The Shadow-walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous. He was editor of Studies in Medievalism from 2003 to 2007.[....]

The purpose of this international project is to investigate the work of Icelandic philologists who were engaged in the study and/or editing of Old Norse-Icelandic literature during the period 1780-1918, with specific focus on the nationalist thinking revealed therein.

Emphasis will be placed on establishing the nationalist discourse of these scholars as a separate issue from the political discourse which accompanied the struggle for Iceland’s independence from Denmark. Their scholarly discourse will be examined as part of the international discussion on the Old Norse-Icelandic cultural heritage and on national culture in general. One manifestation of this was the conflict between Icelanders and other nations over the ‘ownership’ of this heritage or specific parts of it. At the same time, Icelandic scholars enjoyed extensive collaboration with their foreign colleagues, and the nature of this collaboration and the context in which it took place will be the subject of particular attention. Finally, emphasis will be laid on an exploration of the interrelation between the discourse of Icelandic philologists and the reception of Greco-Roman heritage.[....]

Joep Leerssen was awarded this honorary doctorate for his work in the area of imagology (the study of national (self)images and stereotypes) and nationalism studies.

Collective identities play not only a crucial role in the cultural, social and political life, but also in humanities research. The aim of this reading group is to exchange and profit from the theoretical, conceptual and empirical variety provided by humanities research on various forms of collective identities (i.e. national, ethnic, regional, civilizational, artistic, imaginary, political, religious, spatial, urban etc.). Next to reading the work of renowned classic humanities scholars and cutting edge ones, the emphasis however will be on discussing draft versions of participants' own work. 

In this way, the reading group contributes both to the scope of knowledge on collective identities (given the different themes and approaches) and to the concrete applicability of this variety to one’s own research. Since many mechanisms and phenomena within collective identities (such as boundary making, stereotyping, essentialism, identification, politicization, etc.) transcend particular case studies or disciplines, scholars can benefit concretely from each other’s knowledge.  [....]

We are proud to announce that Kim Simonsen, post-doc at SPIN, was awarded the Faroese Literature Price 2014 in the category fiction for his collection of poems "Hvat hjálpur einum menniskja at vakna ein morgun hesumegin hetta áratúsundi" (2013). The judges on the collection: "Words, images and design are a part of an artistic whole, which represents the existential foundation of the persona in the collection. Travels, arrivals and departures as well as heartbreak, boredom combined with the ever-present blind chance of human biology, these forces of life no one can escape are crystallised in how the persona images the role of man and our consciousness. The poems are serious and operate with wide geographical and intertextual angles. Time and space are not fixed, only death defines a natural and endless circulation, questioning if anyone of us did leave any trace in the many billiard years lifetime of the Earth." Check out the ceremony and an interview with Simonsen for Faroese Television here.