“In summer, the song sings itself,” (William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963: The Quotations Page).

Call for Papers

NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN FEATURE FILMS Area – 2008 Film & History Conference

“Film & Science: Fictions, Documentaries, and Beyond” – October 30-November 2, 2008 – Chicago, Illinois

Third-Round Deadline: August 1, 2008

AREA: Nature and the Environment in Feature Films

www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory

This area investigates the uses and representations of nature and the environment in feature films, rather than the more often discussed use of documentaries to reflect on the natural world. Thanks to Al Gore, and others, we expect and respect documentary films that address environmental issues, but feature films can also speak to environmental issues or provide nuanced representations of nature.

Feature films sometimes tackle the same issues and sometimes do so unintentionally. Can feature films provide a forum for discussion on environmental issues? Is such a message always sensationalized with Hollywood stars and big budget special effects? Is this always an intersection of box office revenue and message, with box office the only hoped for winner?

Consider films like Day After Tomorrow or There Will Be Blood. How do these films, and many others, represent the natural world and/or the misuse of that world? What feature films do you identify as overtly or more subtlety environmental? Are there directors who can tell a cinematically good story while making environmental statements? How does shot selection affect a response to the natural world? Can feature film stories be more effective at sending an environmentalist message because of the larger audiences they may reach?

Re-screen your favorite films with an eye to the natural world and environmental considerations.

Submit a brief (200 word) abstract to carmic28@msu.edu by August 1, 2008.

Deborah Carmichael, Michigan State University – Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Culture, 235 Bessey Hall East Lansing MI 48824 517-353-9917

Carmic28@msu.edu

Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal. Deadline for third-round proposals: August 1, 2008

This area, comprising multiple panels, is a part of the 2008 biennial Film & History Conference, sponsored by The Center for the Study of Film and History. Speakers will include founder John O’Connor and editor Peter C. Rollins (in a ceremony to celebrate the transfer to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh); Wheeler Winston Dixon, author of Visions of the Apocalypse, Disaster and Memory, and Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood; Sidney Perkowitz, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University and author of Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, & the End of the World; and special-effects legend Stan Winston, our Keynote Speaker. For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory).

“And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh,” (Friedrich Nietzsche: Wisdom Quotes).

“Big History:” Teaching and Research
October 17-18, 2008
Harford Community College; Bel-Air, MD

MAWHA is pleased to announce our twelfth annual Mid-Atlantic World History Association conference. Our special focus this year will be on the broad themes in World History, how they may be taught and what research is being done to promote their understanding.

Possible topics could include, but are not limited to, the following: -The most important forces operating in world history, such as economics, technology, religion, politics, bioenvironment, great persons, cultural
diffusion, military, etc.
-When did the world as a global community begin?
-Drawing the line between the pre-modern and modern eras?
-The usefulness of concepts like “Southernization” and “Westernization?”
-The role of geography and climate in world history?
-Revisiting Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”
-The impact of various regions on world history
-Explaining the rise and fall of civilizations
-The nomad-sedentary conflict in world history

Possible teaching panels/workshops:
-Using the arts to compare and contrast cultures—visual images
-The use of maps in teaching world history—geographical literacy and world view context
-The role of the textbook in teaching world history
-Using technology to reach today’s students

Possible roundtable discussions:
-Using broad themes as focal points in teaching world history
-Techniques that encourage students to think in terms of broad theme

We welcome proposals on any subject, period or area from independent scholars as well as teachers/scholars from universities, colleges, secondary schools, publishers and other related institutions. Proposals may include individual papers, collaborative projects or roundtable discussions of a topic or theme connected to world history. Please send proposals and curriculum vita by AUGUST 15, 2008 to:

MAWHA Program Committee
Professor Anthony Snyder
asnyder@brookdalecc.edu

-or-

Prof. Anthony Snyder
Dept. of History
Brookdale Community College
Lincroft, NJ  07738
Phone: 732-224-2914
Fax: 732-224-2182
Website: www.mawha.org

A growing body of postcolonial research has established the importance of visual imagery in creating and popularizing ideas about race and cultural difference. Visual representation of Indigenous peoples circulated from local to transnational contexts, participating in colonial networks of global exchange and defining relations of power. One strand of analysis has revealed the complicity of Western scopic regimes and imperialism, tracing the ways that visual cultures express the colonizers’ expanionist gaze.

Another seeks to emphasise the role of Indigenous peoples within this relationship, identifying culturally distinct visual traditions and the reformulation of new media such as photography and museum exhibitions. Descendant re-valuation of the colonial archive is inverting colonial exhibitory practices and spectacle, producing new meanings through re-contextualisation of these images. This conference aims to bring together research and thinking on visual cultures and indigeneity that attends to local specificity as well as the global circuits of visual discourse, illuminating both colonial processes and attempts at declonisation.

Dr Liz Conor

Dr Jane Lydon

Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies – Tel: 61 3 9905 4200

Email: cais@arts.monash.edu.au

Visit the website at http://arts.monash.edu.au/cais/conference/index.php

At the invitation of the German Federal Government representatives of 60 countries met today and yesterday (10th and 11th April 2008) in Berlin at the Preparatory Conference for the Foundation of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

Over the last years the World Council for Renewable Energy (WCRE)and EUROSOLAR have been the main driving force behind the initiative to establish an International Renewable Energy Agency. Now the German Government has agreed to push the process forward. The IRENA shall constitute an independent driving force behind renewable energy and help to create a level playing field for developing renewable energy. Participants at the conference emphasised that, without an organisation such as IRENA, the world will remain unable to realise the benefits of renewable energy in full.

The conference has been very successful. The German Government aims to invite all interested countries to the Founding Conference in autumn 2008. Here you find the Chairs Conclusions and a paper arguing for the establishment of the IRENA. We will provide you with additional documents as well as Hermann Scheers keynote speech within short.

Link conclusions:http://www.wcre.de/en/images/stories/IRENA_Conclusions.pdf

Link “The case for IRENA”:http://www.wcre.de/en/images/stories/The_case_for_IRENA.pdf

World Council for Renewable Energy (WCRE) c/o EUROSOLAR e.V., Kaiser-Friedrich-Str. 11, Bonn 53113, Germany

Phone +49 (0)228 / 36 23 – 73 or – 75, Fax: +49 (0)228 / 36 12 – 13 or – 79

E-Mail: info@wcre.org

Website: http://www.wcre.org

College Art Association Conference, February 25-28, 2009 in Los Angeles

Call for Papers: Water is Power: African Visual Culture
Panel sponsored by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association

Iba Ndiaye Diadji called water fundamental to “African being.” Possessing voice, vitality, and value, water has a magnified place in African cultures, whether celebrated in bounty or meditated on in absence. Scholars have looked at water as foci of performance, altars, and blessing and cleansing accoutrements, and of everyday rituals to wash away harm. This panel seeks new ways in which African artists have approached water as power. Topics may include but are not limited to: art that reflects water’s natural force (drought, hurricane, flood); art that depicts marine life or seascapes; water as a creative force (through water-based mediums); water as bodily constitution (sweat, tears, etc.); water as politicized source (struggles over access and sanitation); water as channel for immigration; water as crosscurrent (port into slavery); and water as rivers of exploration and exchange. This panel welcomes new studies of water’s effective presence in rituals that can broaden the vision of water’s power in African visual culture.

Proposals due May 9, 2008.

Contact Shannen Hill
University of Maryland-College Park
Art History and Archaeology
shill@umd.edu

1211-B Art-Sociology Building
College Park, MD 20742

The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History will award doctoral and post-doctoral research fellowships for the academic year 2008/09.

Successful applicants will be expected to carry out their research work at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Center from October 2008 through June 2009. During this period the fellows are expected to conduct their research in Israel and to participate in the workshops and colloquia of the Rosenzweig Minerva Center.

This call is open to all proposals within the scope of the center’s research interests and activities. We also encourage applications for work regarding theories of language in the context of German- Jewish Culture. In addition, proposals related to the 2008/9 Rosenzweig Center’s Research Project on “Exile and the Production of Knowledge: Culture, Politics and Literature” will be given special emphasis.

Applicants interested in a postdoctoral fellowship must have been awarded the Ph.D. no earlier than October 01, 2005. Applications for a doctoral fellowship can only be accepted if the applicant has been a Ph.D. student for not more than five years.

Applicants may be of all nationalities. Israeli citizens applying for a doctoral fellowship must be registered at the Hebrew University as a Ph.D. student. Israeli citizens who are registered as Ph.D. students at a university abroad will be treated as international applicants.

Successful applicants will be granted a monthly stipend equivalent to 1,000 Euro. Furthermore, international applicants will be enrolled at the Rothberg School for International Students at the Hebrew University which covers health insurance. Fellows from abroad will also be allotted a round-trip flight (up to $800 or €600).

Applicants must submit:
• Application Form (download form from the center’s website)
• Letter of application
• Research proposal (3 – 10 pages)
• Curriculum Vitae
• An example of written work, max. 30 pages
• Two letters of recommendation

Submission of applications and inquiries should be sent to the Rosenzweig Minerva Center by eMail (preferred), regular post or fax. All material can be written either in English, German or Hebrew (the example of written work can be also written in French or Italian). Please arrange for the letters of recommendation to be sent directly to the Rosenzweig Minerva Center by your referees.

Closing date for receipt of applications is May 15th, 2008. Decisions will be made by mid-June, 2008 and applicants will be informed forthwith.

Keren Sagi
The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yitzhak Rabin Building
Mount Scopus
Jerusalem 91905
Phone: 00972-2-588 19 09/588 16 86
Fax: 00972-2-521 13 69
Email: rosenzweig@vms.huji.ac.il
Visit the website at http://rosenzweig.huji.ac.il/

Today, April 22, is Earth Day.  The focus of activities mirrors the different challenges we are facing right now.  Millions of people around the world are rallying behind a Call for Climate, the global warming action theme.  The planet is heating up and with the rising temperature comes the problems associated with global warming (food crisis, rice shortage, changing weather patterns, etc.).  What started 38 years ago in San Francisco, USA, has now spread to all corners of the globe.  In the Philippines, the theme is “Tubig Buhay Natin, Ating Pagyamanin.”  Let us do our part in preserving the Integrity of Creation.  Make every day, Earth Day.

“Redefining the Axis of Beijing: Revolution and Nostalgia in the Planning of the PRC Capital”
 SHUISHAN YU

This Article

Journal of Urban History, Vol. 34, No. 4, 571-608 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0096144207313880
© 2008 SAGE Publications

Redefining the Axis of Beijing
Revolution and Nostalgia in the Planning of the PRC Capital

Shuishan Yu

Oakland University, Michigan

This article analyzes the urban planning controversies that led to the fast expansion of Chang’an Avenue and the irreversible alteration of Beijing’s urban fabric, focusing on the issue of Beijing city’s dominant axis in the Liang-Chen Scheme and Zhu-Zhao Scheme around the year 1950. My argument is that the failure of Liang’s vision for Beijing was mainly due to the nostalgic nature of his proposal and its close affiliation with the imperial model, which did not meet the expectation of the revolutionary spirit of the time. Politics did play a central role in the urban transformation of Beijing in the People’s Republic of China. However, instead of treating architects’ debate as a footnote to Mao’s casual comments, this article integrates the Chinese Communist Party’s political agenda as part of the architectural discourse.