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Kathryn Le Grice, 'Evening Village II' (2011).
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Date and Location
The conference will be held at Gregynog Hall, Newtown, from Friday 11 May to Sunday 13 May, 2018.
Provisional Programme
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Here's the latest draft of the conference programme (as of 25 April 2018) - including panel chairs and the newly added publishing workshop. If you spot any errors - always a possibility at this stage! - please contact the conference organisers.
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Publishing Workshop
I'm very pleased to announce that a publishing workshop has been added to the conference programme. Conducted by Dr Llion Wigley, Commissioning Editor at the University of Wales Press, and aimed in particular at postgraduates and early career scholars, this session will be all about starting to get your academic work published. The workshop - which will take place between 3.00pm and 4.15pm on the Friday in Seminar Room 1 - will include the opportunity for one-to-one consultations with Llion.
Keynote Abstracts
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Please download the abstract for Professor Jane Aaron's keynote here:
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Latest news and discusssions
For conference news and discussions, we are using the hashtag #awwe18 on Twitter.
Book Your Place
As of 15 April 2018, overnight bookings for the conference are now closed. If you want to see whether anyone has dropped out and an on-site room has become free, please contact the conference organisers directly.
To book as a day delegate only (no accommodation on the Gregynog site), please click here.
To book as a day delegate only (no accommodation on the Gregynog site), please click here.
Accommodation for Day Delegates
For day delegates, if you need somewhere to stay overnight near the conference site, the following list offers a selection of accommodation within c. 20 minutes’ drive of Gregynog Hall.
1. Hotels
http://www.elephantandcastlehotel.co.uk/
http://www.maesmawrhall.co.uk/
http://www.thedolforinn.com/
2. B&Bs
http://www.dolforwyn.com/
https://www.parkersnewtown.co.uk/
https://poppiesguesthouse.com/
https://www.booking.com/hotel/gb/rhyd-lydan.en-gb.html
http://www.bedandbreakfastnewtown.co.uk/
https://www.theoldvicaragedolfor.co.uk/
http://www.midwalesarts.org.uk/bandb.php
3. Airbnb
https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/12331219
https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/23993856
https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/16773740
https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/2271063
4. Serviced Apartments
http://www.penygelli.co.uk/
1. Hotels
http://www.elephantandcastlehotel.co.uk/
http://www.maesmawrhall.co.uk/
http://www.thedolforinn.com/
2. B&Bs
http://www.dolforwyn.com/
https://www.parkersnewtown.co.uk/
https://poppiesguesthouse.com/
https://www.booking.com/hotel/gb/rhyd-lydan.en-gb.html
http://www.bedandbreakfastnewtown.co.uk/
https://www.theoldvicaragedolfor.co.uk/
http://www.midwalesarts.org.uk/bandb.php
3. Airbnb
https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/12331219
https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/23993856
https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/16773740
https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/2271063
4. Serviced Apartments
http://www.penygelli.co.uk/
Our Temporary Email Glitch
For a couple of weeks from about March 6th, messages to our conference email address (awwe18@awwe.org) temporarily stopped being delivered to the conference organisers. If you sent in a proposal or query to awwe18@awwe.org over that period and haven't heard back from us, that's why. Please do get back in touch! The awwe18@awwe.org email address is now working again. Alternatively, please contact Professor Matthew Jarvis directly. Sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused...
Conference Fees, Accommodation, Financial Support & Travel
Conference fees are as follows:
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Standard Rates
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Rates for Student, Unwaged & Low-Waged Delegates
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Accommodation
All accommodation is provided on-site at Gregynog Hall.
Financial Support
Through the kind financial support of AWWE Patrons, a limited number of bursaries will be available to offset travel costs for student, unwaged and low-waged delegates. Please contact the Association Treasurer for more details. We will also consider reducing fees for student, unwaged and low-waged delegates in cases of particular financial hardship. Again, please contact the Association Treasurer for advice.
Travel
Directions to Gregynog Hall are provided here. Please note that conference fees do not include travel costs.
All accommodation is provided on-site at Gregynog Hall.
Financial Support
Through the kind financial support of AWWE Patrons, a limited number of bursaries will be available to offset travel costs for student, unwaged and low-waged delegates. Please contact the Association Treasurer for more details. We will also consider reducing fees for student, unwaged and low-waged delegates in cases of particular financial hardship. Again, please contact the Association Treasurer for advice.
Travel
Directions to Gregynog Hall are provided here. Please note that conference fees do not include travel costs.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
We are delighted to confirm our three keynote speakers as follows:
- Keynote Speaker (Friday): Professor Bella Dicks, Head of Research, Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum Wales
- Keynote Speaker (Saturday): Professor Jane Aaron, Emeritus Professor, University of South Wales
- Creative Keynote Speaker: Alys Conran, winner of the 2017 Wales Book of the Year for Pigeon
PerformanceOn the Friday evening, after dinner, we're excited to be welcoming Living Histories Cymru (Helen Sandler and Jane Hoy) to perform their dramatised talk 'An Extraordinary Female Affection: At Home with the Ladies of Llangollen', about the eighteenth-century female couple/romantic friends who lived at Plas Newydd.
For more about Living Histories Cymru, please see their Facebook page. |
Photo credit: Norena Shopland
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Fiction Focus
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In an exciting event scheduled for the Saturday afternoon of the conference, we welcome former Director of the Institute for Welsh Affairs, John Osmond, to talk about his first novel, Ten Million Stars Are Burning (published by Gomer at the end of March).
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In a session titled ‘Dreaming a Political Homeland', John will be in conversation with leading scholar Professor Katie Gramich to discuss this first installment of a three-part fiction series that seeks to track Wales’s cultural and political journey from 1979 to 1997.
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Conference Book Launches
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Friday
For our Friday evening book launch, we're delighted to feature Honno's new Welsh Women's Classics edition of Margiad Evans's 1936 novel Creed. We'll be joined for the launch by the volume's editor Dr Sue Asbee. Thank you for joining us, Sue, and we look forward very much to hearing what you have to say about the book 
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Saturday
We are excited to be featuring the launch of Dr Laura Wainwright's New Territories in Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing, 1930-1949 (University of Wales Press, 2018), on the Saturday evening of the conference. The launch will feature a discussion between Laura and Professor Daniel Williams. We very much look forward to welcoming Laura and to celebrating her book. |
Artwork
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Our conference image - featured at the top of the page - is 'Evening Village II' (2011) by Welsh artist Kathryn Le Grice. For more about Kathryn, please see her website.
She writes: 'I feel that I am currently living the "hiraeth years"! The idea of home has never been more prominent in my life. I've lived in a kind of limbo between Wales and America since 2007 but since we moved out here more permanently almost four years ago (and subsequently moved from the South of California to the North), the need to find "home" and what it means has become very significant.'
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Kathryn Le Grice, 'Evening Village II' (2011)
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Kathryn's work will be featured in a three-artist exhibition in Swansea's Attic Gallery this April, alongside material by David Randal Davies (her father) and Karel Lek. Please do take the time to visit the exhibition if you can!
We are very grateful to Kathryn for her permission to feature her work as part of our conference.
We are very grateful to Kathryn for her permission to feature her work as part of our conference.
“‘Home’. When you say a word slowly it can seem suddenly strange. ‘Home’. Is that really how you spell it? And what does it mean? ‘Hoam’. ‘Hohm’.” – John Barnie, Footfalls in the Silence: A Memoir (2014)
Call for Papers
Our thirtieth anniversary conference will ask what ‘home’ means within the context of the English-language literary traditions of Wales. In his 1977 volume Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan suggested that home is ‘the focal point of a cosmic structure’, and argued that ‘Human groups nearly everywhere tend to regard their own homeland as the center of the world.’ More recently, Michael Allen Fox has proposed that ‘Self and home are inseparable elements, with each depending on the other for its existence and properties.’ He has also emphasised concepts of familiarity and belonging: ‘In English, “home” stands for a place of residence, belonging, and attachment’ and is bound up with ideas of ‘familiarity, attraction, warmth of feeling, pride, a special sense of bonding’. The primary emotional content of home has similarly been articulated by Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling who note that home is not just a ‘site’, but is crucially ‘an idea and an imaginary imbued with feelings’.
However, cultural concepts of home are not stable. Thus, counteracting familiar associations between home and (at least) semi-permanence, Fox observes how, for the Nootka First Nations people, the notion of home is mobile and thus ‘“house” is more of a verb than a noun’. Moreover, literary studies have long been interested in the potential unfamiliarity of home, as expressed in concepts to do with the Unheimliche/uncanny. What is more, in a specifically Welsh context, the notion of hiraeth is precisely to do with longing for the absent home-place. Home discomforts and the pains of home lost or distant are, in short, just as important to our thinking about home as notions of security, comfort, and stability.
This conference, then, invites contributions that consider expressions of ‘home’ across the English-language literatures of Wales, through a focus on issues including but not limited to:
Proposals and Deadline
Proposals for 20-minute papers or multi-contributor panels should be sent to the organisers at awwe18@awwe.org by Thursday 1 March 2018. Proposals should be no more than 300 words long and should include a short biographical note.
This year we are also inviting c. 2000-word ‘work in progress’ papers, which will be distributed to conference participants in advance and will form the basis for discussion panels rather than formal presentations. Please specify that your proposal is for a ‘work in progress’ paper if you wish to follow this route.
We welcome papers from new and emerging scholars.
Please note that the conference will not accept proposals for all-male panels.
However, cultural concepts of home are not stable. Thus, counteracting familiar associations between home and (at least) semi-permanence, Fox observes how, for the Nootka First Nations people, the notion of home is mobile and thus ‘“house” is more of a verb than a noun’. Moreover, literary studies have long been interested in the potential unfamiliarity of home, as expressed in concepts to do with the Unheimliche/uncanny. What is more, in a specifically Welsh context, the notion of hiraeth is precisely to do with longing for the absent home-place. Home discomforts and the pains of home lost or distant are, in short, just as important to our thinking about home as notions of security, comfort, and stability.
This conference, then, invites contributions that consider expressions of ‘home’ across the English-language literatures of Wales, through a focus on issues including but not limited to:
- the physical structures of home;
- specifically Welsh architectures of home;
- homeland/s;
- home as cultural practice;
- home as ‘an imaginary imbued with feelings’;
- the geographical limits of home;
- home and family;
- home and community;
- home and language;
- the unheimlich;
- home as the locus of discomfort;
- home as lost or distant;
- home and mobility;
- home and the performance of gender;
- home and the operations of power;
- home and Wales-specific concepts such as hiraeth or cynefin.
Proposals and Deadline
Proposals for 20-minute papers or multi-contributor panels should be sent to the organisers at awwe18@awwe.org by Thursday 1 March 2018. Proposals should be no more than 300 words long and should include a short biographical note.
This year we are also inviting c. 2000-word ‘work in progress’ papers, which will be distributed to conference participants in advance and will form the basis for discussion panels rather than formal presentations. Please specify that your proposal is for a ‘work in progress’ paper if you wish to follow this route.
We welcome papers from new and emerging scholars.
Please note that the conference will not accept proposals for all-male panels.
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To download a PDF of the Call for Papers, please click here:
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Conference Organisers
Professor Matthew Jarvis (University of Wales Trinity Saint David/Aberystwyth University) and Dr Jamie Harris (Aberystwyth University)
Contact
To contact the conference organisers with any queries, please email awwe18@awwe.org
Support
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The conference is supported by the Learned Society of Wales. We are profoundly grateful to the LSW for their assistance.
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