This sounds like an interesting conference about H. G. Wells’ cosmopolitanism that I heard about on the IAFA email list. Read below for the details:
H. G. Wells: From Kent to Cosmopolis
An international conference to be held at the Darwin Conference Suite,
University of Kent at Canterbury, England
July 9-11, 2010
CALL FOR PAPERS
The conference marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the
H. G. Wells Society in 1960 together with the centenary of Wells’s
comic masterpiece The History of Mr Polly. It will take place in what
Mr Polly found to be the ‘congenial situation’ of Canterbury, the
Kentish cathedral city within easy reach of Folkestone and Sandgate
where Wells lived in the early twentieth century and wrote some of his
best-known works.
We shall examine Wells both as a novelist formed by local
circumstances of his time and place, and as a thinker and social
prophet who remains intensely relevant today. We aim to discuss
Wells’s links to modern science fiction in all media, his imagining of
worlds to come, his political, social and ecological expectations for
the 21st century, and his success as an artist and controversialist
both then and now.
We invite proposals for papers on all aspects of Wells’s life and
writings: his science fiction, his novels and short stories, his
political, sociological and autobiographical works, and his
contributions to education, journalism and the cinema. In keeping with
the conference title ‘From Kent to Cosmopolis’ we hope to attract
contributions which relate the local to the universal in his writings
and/or look at Wells’s achievements in relation to wider cultural,
historical, temporal and spatial perspectives.
250 word abstracts for 20-minute papers should be sent by 1 March 2010
to Andrew M. Butler and Patrick Parrinder at
2010wellsconference@gmail.com
Priority booking for the conference at bargain rates is available up
to 30 June 2009. Contact the Hon. Treasurer, Paul Allen, at
PaulMalcolmAllen@aol.com
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