Sogndal, Norway, 6-7 September 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite proposals for our interdisciplinary conference on “Literary Exhibitions and Author Museums”, which will bring together leading scholars and practitioners in the field, featuring plenaries by literary scholar and expert on authors’ houses Professor Nicola Watson and ethnologist and previous director of the Strindberg Museum Stefan Bohman.

How might literary exhibitions give us a better understanding, not only of an author’s life, but also the creative process, the role of literature, and indeed the author’s writing? How do literary exhibitions interlink real and literary spaces, texts, objects and readers? How do they use new and innovative mediums of communication, and which “old-fashioned” mediums and display practices are still worth keeping? In an age of cultural diversity, how do literary exhibitions help create new kinds of cultural identity? How can they and how can literature help develop democracy today? Can established author museums learn from other biographical museums, art museums and other cultural history museums, and from their ways of making exhibitions in general? Can author museums challenge what is seen as part of an authors work and what is kept as part of their legacy and of cultural heritage?

Literature and authors’ lives are exhibited in a wide range of contexts, including not only the historical homes of authors, but also author museums, author centres, national literary museums, novel-museums (Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence), national and local libraries, literary parks, and even (in a sense) in bookshops. Authors’ homes in particular have for long been seen as sites of an old-fashioned cult of national heroes, or made only by and for fans. They often attempt to convey a special aura around the space and various objects the author has once owned.

Custodial institutions are responding however to changes both in society and in the way we think about authors, literature and readers, and the relationships between them. At this conference we will be asking how they have been changing since their inceptions, what challenges they face today and how we might imagine them in the future.

The conference will bring together theoretical and hands-on expertise on literature, history, museums and tourism. We invite proposals for paper presentations, workshops/interactive sessions, posters, virtual talks or other formats.

The conference will take place at the Sogndal campus of the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, and is arranged by the Research Council of Norway research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums, a cooperation between the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and the University of Oslo.

Programming will begin with registration at 09:00 on Thursday 6 September and ends after lunch on Friday 7 September, with a conference dinner on Thursday evening and an excursion on literary tourism, to the book village in Fjærland, on Friday afternoon.

Please send abstracts (ca. 200 words) to Ulrike Spring (ulrike.spring@hvl.no) by 20 April 2018.