2nd International conference, Riga, June 7–8, 2018
Call for papers
The second edition of the international conference „Queer Narratives in European Cultures” invites scholars from various fields of humanities who deal with LGBTI history and queer theory. The conference will be focused on the region of the Baltic States and their neighboring countries – the region of East and Central Europe where LGBTI and queer studies are still an emerging discipline. Due to the historical conditions and the post-socialist legacy, LGBTI activism and scholarship of gay and lesbian history of the region has developed almost simultaneously with queer theory and its politics of difference and anti-representation. The conference will focus on both of these divisions, serving as a meeting point for scholars of different backgrounds and disciplines.
The themes of the conference are subjectivity, memory and nation. We welcome you to explore both the history of the region and the current situation, to focus on the role of the subject with its desires and experiences as well as on the problem of agency in different time periods. We also invite you to think about the processes of construction and representation of the memory both by individuals and groups. Discussions of nation and nationalism are also present when speaking about the LGBTI and queer community and relationship between the state and the individual choices of persons. The scholars are welcomed to propose their papers or panels which fall in the relevant topics.
Proposals for Individual Papers
Please provide the title and a 300-word abstract of the paper you are proposing; your name, institutional affiliation, and e-mail address; and a brief statement (100 words max) about your work and publications.
Proposals for Panels
Please provide a 700-word (max) description of the panel topic and of each panelist’s abstract; the title of the panel and the titles of the individual papers; and for each
participant the name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a 100-word statement about the person’s work and publications. Note that each bio may be up to 100 words, and the bios are separate from the 700-word proposal.
Proposals should be emailed to both conference coordinators Jānis Ozoliņš and Kārlis Vērdiņš queerculture2018@gmail.com (ILFA, University of Latvia). The deadline for applications is March 12, 2018. We will send out replies till March 19, 2018.
Keynote speakers
Dan Healey is Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Oxford, UK. He is the author of Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (2001), Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Sexual Disorder in Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (2009), and Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (2017).
Lukasz Szulc is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and the Marie Curie Fellow in the Media and Communication Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. He is the author of Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland (2017) and the editor of LGBTQs, Media and Culture in Europe (with Alexander Dhoest and Bart Eeckhout, 2016).
Jaanus Samma is an Estonian artist. Since 2007, he has focused his artistic research on collecting the hidden histories of gay lives in Soviet Estonia. His project Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale (2015) was based on the life story of war hero and kolkhoz chairman Juhan Ojaste. It represented Estonia at the 56th Venice Art Biennale