Modern Humanities Research Association

Portuguese Studies – Editing Call for Young Scholars

2020-11-25T08:00:01+00:00

Portuguese Studies is a twice-yearly MHRA journal which publishes a themed special issue every Autumn. This year, we would like to run a pilot scheme in which young scholars are invited to submit proposals for their own special themed issues. By young scholars we mean: Early Career Researchers (ECRs), Postdoctoral students and PhD students. In line with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, we define an ECR as: “an individual who is within eight years of the award of their PhD or equivalent professional training, or an individual who is within six years of starting their first academic appointment.”

We would like to receive proposals for special issues co-edited by two applicants who want to work together. At least one of these two applicants must be at either postdoctoral or ECR level and at least one must be based in the UK or Republic of Ireland. A suitable member of the Portuguese Studies Editorial Board will act as a mentor for the project(s) chosen. However, the invited team will have full co-editing responsibility and receive full co-editing credit.

We are aiming to publish the results of the successful proposal as our special issue in October-November 2022. Because this is the bicentenary of Brazilian Independence in 1822, and also the centenary of the São Paulo ‘Semana de Arte Moderna’ in 1922 we would like the proposals to reflect this. This can mean, but does not have to mean, working explicitly on the historical or artistic events surrounding either of these dates. Portuguese Studies publishes a wide range of research on the histories, cultures and societies of the Lusophone world. We would therefore be happy to consider proposals for our 2022 special which interpret the potential of 1822 or 1922 broadly and creatively, in national or transnational contexts. We would be open to any of the conceptual frameworks below, or indeed any other interpretation of issues arising from 1822 or 1922, for which a sound academic case is made.

Indigenous arts, histories or cultures
The black or brown Atlantic
Afro-Brazilian arts, histories or cultures
Independence
Cultural transnationalisms
Cultural memory
Cinema, photography, digital culture or other visual or audiovisual forms
Gender, feminisms or LGBTQ+ histories

We would like to consider proposals at our next Editorial Board in May 2021. Please complete the ‘special issue proposal form’, downloadable from the link in the ‘Themed Issues’ section of our Home Page and send it along with an up to date CV to our Editorial Assistant Richard Correll on: portuguese@mhra.org.uk by 30 April 2021.

All articles in Portuguese Studies must be submitted in English. An issue typically has space for around six articles averaging 7,500 words, or eight articles of 5,500 words. In addition, each issue contains reviews: some of those will be of general publications in the field, but issue editors should also work with the journal's Reviews Editor to ensure that, where possible, each issue also contains reviews directly relevant to its specific topic. All articles are subject to normal peer review, so the acceptance of a themed special issue proposal does not signal automatic acceptance of all papers submitted as part of that issue.

We hope to use this pilot opportunity to launch a future system of regular ‘Young Scholar’ calls for special numbers of Portuguese Studies, edited by ECR colleagues, postdoctoral students and PhD students, along the lines outlined above, and supported by ‘special issue’ editing workshops at the ABIL (Association of British and Irish Lusitanists) Conference.

New General Editor of Moving Image

2020-11-23T08:00:01+00:00

Legenda is pleased to welcome John David Rhodes as the new chair of the editorial board for Moving Image.

John David Rhodes is Reader in Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge, where he is Director of the Centre for Film and Screen and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. He taught at York and Sussex before moving to Cambridge. He has published widely on American and European cinema, experimental cinema, and on the subjects of place and architecture in cinema. His books include Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (2017), Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (2011), a BFI Classics volume on Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (first published in 2011 and released in a second, revised edition in 2020), as well as several edited volumes. He has held the Balsdon fellowship at the British School in Rome and the Tomàs Harris visiting professorship in the History of Art at UCL.

We are very grateful to Professor Emma Wilson, the founding general editor of the series, for all of her work. This changing of the guard, after many years of service, also sees two other lomg-serving committee members stepping down: Erica Carter and Robert Gordon. Our thanks go also to them. Their successors on the Moving Image committee will be anmounced shortly.

Poetry from the Portuguese

2020-11-12T08:00:01+00:00

Once in a while we publish a number of a journal in a paperback edition for general readers, alongside the regular library-friendly journal edition: and the latest of these is Modern Portuguese Poetry, edited by Paulo de Medeiros and Rosa Maria Martelo, which also appears as volume 36.2 of Portuguese Studies.

Priced at just £15 in paperback, this unique volume aims to give a sense of where contemporary poetry in Portuguese has got to, and a range of essays is supplemented by an anthology in parallel text. These are poems which English readers will mostly never have seen before, by Adília Lopes, Ana Luísa Amaral, António Franco Alexandre, Gastão Cruz, José Miguel Silva, Manuel de Freitas, Margarida Vale de Gato, and Rui Pires Cabral; and they're translated by some of the most important literary translators from Portuguese working today.

Crackanthorpe’s Travels

2020-11-09T09:00:01+00:00

Hubert Crackanthorpe, 1870-1896 — and note the narrowness of that date range — was a young man of letters amid a cosmopolitan group of writers and artists, and who wrote short prose of all kinds: literary criticism, pen-portraits of places and scenes, fiction. He was a key writer of the Decadent period, and old copies of his books remain in libraries, but Crackanthorpe has not had a solid edition of his work put into print for over fifty years. Until now, with the release of Hubert Crackanthorpe: Selected Writings, edited by William Greenslade and Emanuela Ettorre, which is volume 7 in our Jewelled Tortoise series.

Here is a little landscape from Crackanthorpe's Vignettes: A Miniature Journal of Whim and Sentiment (1896) — not because it's typical of Crackanthorpe's work, which is often more down to earth, but just because vignettes make good extracts. In this one he's writing about the Basque country, but he was fully capable of the same tone of numinous wonder about, say, Chelsea.

All day an intense impression of lusty sunlight, of quivering golden-green .... a long, white road that dazzles, between its rustling dark-green walls; blue brawling rivers; swelling upland meadows, flower-thronged, luscious with tall, cool grass; the shepherd’s thin-toned pipe; the ragged flocks, blocking the road, cropping at the hedge-rows as they hurry on towards the mountains; the slow, straining teams of jangling mules — wine-carriers coming from Spain; through dank, cobbled village streets, where the pigs pant their bellies in the roadway, and the sandal-makers flatten the hemp before their doors; and then, out again into the lusty sunlight, along the straight, powdery road that dazzles ahead interminably towards a mysterious, hazy horizon, where the land melts into the sky....

And, at last, the cool evening scents; soft shadows stealing beneath the still, silent oaks; and, all at once, a sight of the great snow-mountains, vague, phantasmagoric, like a mirage in the sky; and of the hills, all indigo, rippling towards a pale sunset of liquid gold.

A more representative sample can be read on Google Books via this new edition's home page.

Susan Tilby, née Wharton

2020-11-09T08:00:01+00:00

It is with a heavy heart that we must record that Dr Susan Tilby died on 3 November, in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. (Her death was not Covid-related.) Our condolences go out to her family, and in particular to her husband Michael Tilby, whom our colleagues in French studies will also know.

Susan was for many years an editor of scholarly books and journals, credited mainly as Susan Wharton. She was an especially fine hand at bibliographies and indexes: her cumulative index to the Year's Work in Modern Language Studies was a tour de force. For volume 76 alone, for example, Susan's index ran to 66 pages in three columns, from Aalen, M., and Aaslestad, P., to Þorgeirsson, H. (You were expecting a "Z" there, weren't you?) We had an annual game whereby I would write cross-checking programs to try to catch out errors in the first proof of the index – I won if the error rate proved to be larger than last year, Susan won if smaller. It was usually Susan who won. The Year's Work was an epic undertaking to organise, too, and involved herding a great many cats, some of them strays. Susan managed the practical business of the work for many years, first with Stephen Parkinson as General Editor, and more recently with Graeme Dunphy and Paul Scott.

But many other authors also have reason to be grateful to Susan. From 2010 onwards, she copy-edited 36 books for Legenda, including some of our most ambitious: Malcolm Bowie's selected essays, in two volumes; Clive Scott's study of translation and phenomenology; the epic Festschrift for Martin McLaughlin; and most recently Joep Leerssen's magisterial history of Comparative Literature in Britain — somehow a fitting title to go out on, if one has to go out.

Susan had the wryness in adversity which sustains all great copy-editors. To give the littlest flavour of it here, when she retired from the Year's Work this spring she wrote to me saying: "I am hanging up my quill once I've put the current volume (80) to bed — not that it's even got into its pyjamas as yet."

Concrete

2020-11-01T08:00:01+00:00

Every new book is an abstract idea for a while: something still hypothetical, as we look at proposals and drafts, and exchange emails. When it's announced, for the first time it becomes concrete — a thing we are definitely going to do. And we are now definitely going to do Rachel Elizabeth Robinson's new book Visual and Plastic Poetics: From Brazilian Concretism to the Chilean Neo-Avant-Garde, due out in our Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures series in 2021.

We are very grateful to Cecilia Vicuña, one of Chile's most important contemporary cultural figures, for permission to use one of her celebrated Palabrarmas on our cover. (Palabras, words: armas, weapons.) This work is from 1974, the first full year of the Pinochet dictatorship, when it could not safely be exhibited: it was an act of resistance. Many early Vicuña works have still only recently emerged into showings worldwide, but they are now an influence on young artists and writers: see Vicuña's Instagram feed of the Palabrarmas for more.

We seem to be on an avant-garde poetry jag at present, having just published Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German; we included some collage poems by Rui Pires Cabral in the anthology of modern Portuguese verse in the issue of Portuguese Studies now at the printers. Avant-gardes — if that's the plural — tend to be monocultural, or at least, confined to a single language area, if only because it is very hard to translate concrete poetry in any satisfactory way. But that doesn't mean there isn't cross-cultural spread. Just as Dutch and German experimental writing played off against each other, so too Brazilian poetry influenced what was happening in Chile.

Roy Wisbey

2020-10-25T08:00:01+00:00

We are sad to record the death of Roy Wisbey, one of the most significant figures in the hundred-year history of the MHRA, in Cambridge on 21 October. His contribution continues to shape the Association today, and we will remember him with gratitutde.

An obituary is being prepared for this website by David Wells, so that this post will be replaced with a more substantial appreciation when this is ready. For the moment, our thoughts are with his family.

New WPH Editor Wanted

2020-10-20T09:00:01+01:00

The MHRA (Modern Humanities Research Association) is looking for a second postgraduate editor for its online journal, MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities. Working Papers was launched in 2006 and is aimed at early career researchers and postgraduates.

The successful applicant will serve as a second postgraduate representative to the MHRA Executive Committee, attending three committee meetings per year in London and advising on postgraduate matters. The position may also involve an element of conference organisation.

This position starts on 1 December 2020 and ends in November 2022. Whilst unpaid, it offers invaluable experience in the world of academic publishing, as well as representing a chance to work constructively for the future of the Humanities more broadly. Applications are welcome from postgraduates in their first or second year of doctoral study working in any of the ‘modern humanities’, defined as relating to the modern and medieval languages, literatures and cultures of Europe (including English and the Slavonic languages, and the cultures of the European diaspora).

Applicants should send a CV and cover letter (in a single Word file, please), together with a letter of support from their supervisor, as email attachments to Mrs Adeline Callander (adeline.callander.1957@gmail.com), MHRA Administrator, by 12 November 2020. Informal enquiries are welcome and may be addressed to the current representatives at postgrads@mhra.org.uk.

Catalan Walls

2020-10-10T09:00:01+01:00

We are delighted to announce Emily Jenkins's new book The Visualization of a Nation: Tàpies and Catalonia, due out in our Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures series in summer 2021.

Tàpies belonged to the club of modern European artists to reach surname-only status in their own lifetimes – compare Hockney, Picasso – and his art at its most direct is not at all what you might guess from Wikipedia's punctilious styling of his name, as the Most Illustrious Antoni Tàpies i Puig, 1st Marquess of Tàpies. (Which somehow reminds me of Catalonia's most famous son in Englush fiction, Patrick O'Brian's naval surgeon Stephen Maturin, who is also obscurely of the nobility.)

Tàpies had a long, long productive life, with retrospective shows as early as the 1960s. His output is not easy to categorise and tends to sit in intermediate positions on any given axis. More like painting than sculpture; more like object than experience; more like abstract than portrait; more like expression than manifesto. His murals "about" Catalonian identity have a kind of angry pride, and a Banksy-like way of talking to everyone passing by, not just to a bunch of critics. But those murals are not typical of his work.

Like all great artists, Tàpies was neither an enemy of the State nor its friend. He was occasionally arrested, it is true, but his artistic life under Franco was nothing like so constrained as that of, say, Shostakovich under Stalin. After the coming of democracy — by which time Tàpies had a following in Paris and New York — the two claimants to the title of "the State" competed to heap greater honours on him. Barcelona's would-be governments fêted Tàpies as an iconic and — they would like to think — distinctively Catalonian figure. He has his own personal museum in the heart of the city. On the other hand, Tàpies was also claimed by the Madrid art scene, and in 2010 King Juan Carlos I issued Royal Decree no. 433 to make him not only a peer but a hereditary one, so that his son is now the 2nd Marquess of Tápies. This is a drastic way to co-opt somebody's national identity, but it worked. As of today Wikipedia's top line calls him "Spanish", not "Catalonian".

Legenda at JSTOR

2020-10-04T09:00:01+01:00

JSTOR is a non-profit platform originally founded back in 1995 — 1995! — for the reliable, long-term storage of electronic journals: in fact, its name is nothing more than a contract of Journal Storage. As often happens with on-the-nose trade names, though — consider International Business Machines, or American Telephone & Telegraph — the J part of JSTOR has become an anachronism, or at least, no longer the whole story. Since 2012, JSTOR has also offered a flourishing platform for e-books under the Books@JSTOR banner, and MHRA was an early partner. Most of our titles in the Texts and Translations imprint are there: see this rundown.

Legenda's ebook story comes in two halves because of its business history. Titles published before October 2016 are distributed by Routledge on our behalf: so ebooks of those are being released by Taylor & Francis, Routledge's parent company. For titles from October 2016 onwards, with just two exceptions for legal rights reasons, we can now announce that all Legenda books are now available on Books@JSTOR: 109 books in all.

This comes as good news for some of our colleagues organising reading lists for the new academic year's courses, with many university courses beginning to shift much further towards ebook usage: we've had numerous enquiries in recent months, and it's good to be able to meet this demand. Future Legenda titles will be issued more or less simultaneously in hardback and in ebook form, so over 20 more will appear later this month.