THE SPACE BETWEEN
Literature and Culture 1914-1945

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Past Conferences

2010 (12th annual conference): Belief and Disbelief in the Space Between, 1914-1945, University of Portland, Portland, Oregon, June 17-19, 2010

The interwar years have often been regarded as a period of secularization, disillusionment, and disenchantment, yet many of the period’s cultural productions engage questions of faith, Belief, and spirituality. This interdisciplinary conference invites literary and cultural critics, historians, and scholars of modern religion and philosophy to explore a range of topics relating to the collision of belief and disbelief in the years between 1914 and 1945.

Possible topics include:

•  religious themes and traditions in the arts and popular culture
•  the impact of war on faith and the apprehension of the unseen
•  new conceptions of the sacred and the profane
•  the rise of faith-infused nationalism
•  political propaganda as secular dogma
•  artistic representations of the supernatural or the fantastic
•  aesthetic principles informed by belief or disbelief
•  the public and private dimensions of faith and doubt
•  disillusionment in traditional institutions
•  the coexistence of magic and science
•  the role of class, gender, and/or ethnicity in religious identification
•  engagement with non-Western religions and those crossing cultural, ethnic, and national boundaries

Keynote Speaker: Gauri Viswanathan, Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998) and "Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy" (PMLA 2008).

2009 (11th annual conference): Sound and Silence in the Space Between, 1914-1945, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, June 11-13.

From the growl of automobile and airplane engines and the whir of electric appliances to fascism’s oppressive silences, the years between 1914 and 1945 witnessed a variety of new sounds and silences. This interdisciplinary conference invites historians and critics of literature, art, music, film, dance, and popular culture to explore the myriad sounds and silences of the interwar period. Possible topics include:

• The impact of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and sound film on modern subjectivity and expression
• The new sounds of technology and war
• The enforced silencing of political and cultural critique
• The sounds of political and social protest
• Silence as spirituality, as resistance, as consent
• The sounds of previously marginalized or disenfranchised voices
• The incorporation of sound and noise into literature and art
• The rising awareness of sound in shaping everyday experience
• The breakdown of classical tonality and the rise of new tonal structures

Keynote Speaker: Emily Thompson, Professor of History, Princeton University.

2008 (tenth annual conference): Discovering, Constructing, and Imagining the Other in the Space Between, 1914-1945, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 13-14 June.

This conference addresses the history, representation or self-representation, and interpretations of those exiled, refugee, and migrant “Others” created between 1914-1945 by two world wars and the reformation of national, ethnic, racial, classed, and gendered identities and cultures.

We welcome paper proposals that address national and exile literatures, and other art forms such as film, photography, architecture, painting and sculpture, dissident political and sexual expression, cultural and ethnic mythologies, environmental and geographical interventions, and revivals and interpretations of such cultural artifacts as ancient languages, national dress, dance, folklore, music, and oral traditions.

Keynote speaker: Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan, author of The Temple of Culture.

2007 (ninth annual conference): The Experience of War in the Space Between, 1914-1945, Annapolis, MD, 7-10 June.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore the cultural contexts, manifestations, representations, and effects of war, as a four-decade state of combat, mobilization, upheaval, dislocation, anxiety, devastation, and unquiet aftermath between 1914 and 1945. The experience of war generated creativity and innovation as much as it did destruction and reactionary responses. Some vital questions might be addressed:

· How has historical interpretation of the period 1914-1945 affected how we conceive of the period, especially imagining intersections between historiography and cultural production in all forms?
· Did war foster or inhibit Modernism(s)?
· Did specifically classed or gendered experiences of war empower cultural production?
· How was popular culture influenced by the experience of war?
· How did war fought in colonies affect metropolitan cultural production?
· How politically-engaged, or apolitical, or subversive were the proliferation of “isms” or artists and writers of the interwar years?
· Are there connections between art, war propaganda, and the rise of mass media?
· How was the rationalization and systematization of violence reflected in art?

2006 (eighth annual conference): Mobility/Stasis/Modernity in the Space Between, 1914-1945, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, June 8-10.

Acceleration, terminal velocity, downward-spiral, displacement, paralysis, collision, modernity. The years 1914-1945 were marked by wars colliding with peace movements, by the formation of new nations, the dissolution of old empires, and the voluntary and forced movement of people from ancient homelands to modern and nascent nation-states. Mobility, exile, migration, diaspora, and expulsion produced expatriates and immigrants, the return of the soldier, the lost generation, the exile of surplus women, and the liberation of others. Speed and slow-motion, fragmentation and revolution transformed people, technology, and art.

From army “mobilization” in August 1914 to the liberation of death camps and nuclear annihilation in 1945, the interwar and war years witnessed political, economic, and cultural upheavals that in concert with technological revolutions in transport and warfare revolutionized the movement of masses and the creation of art, literature, film, and other media. Planes, underground shelters, tanks, and skyscraper elevators altered social relations and destabilized class, cultural, and racial barriers—as did, in far more dire ways, trench warfare, air raids, and transport to concentration and death camps. New media such as the cinema, the newsreel, and the wireless enlarged viewers’ perceptions and eradicated distances, confronting audiences with the excitement and terror of far-away places. Such physical, political, and cultural eruptions, confinements and displacements produced new forms of literature and art.

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the contexts, manifestations, effects, and representations of motion and stasis during the years 1914-1945. What did it mean to live, work, create, and be killed at the center of these turbulent times? We are eager to explore the multiple ways in which the mobility and immobilities of the period found their way into cultural production.

Keynote Speaker: Roberto Dainotto, Associate Professor of Romance Studies, Duke University.


2005 (seventh annual conference): Technology, Media, Culture in the Space Between, 1914-1945, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, May 27-29.

Beginning with the mass mechanization of the Great War, the period through World War II catapulted people into a new kind of modernity. New technologies and media conjured up both awesome and frightful fantasies and realities in the creative and critical imaginations of artists, scientists, producers, consumers, and critics. Technology and media excited and threatened domestic and international politics and challenged members of popular and elite cultures to reconfigure relationships between selfhood, society, and the object world.

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the manifestations, effects, and representations of the new technologies of the 1914-1945 period. Considering this distinct period in twentieth-century history will offer crucial perspectives and insights on the significance of visual and auditory technologies, designed and built technologies, technologies of the body, technologies of flight, speed and simultaneity, technologies of production, technologies of social engineering. We are particularly interested in exploring the cultural relationships that emerge as the roles of the media and technology shape each other in our Space Between.

Keynote speaker: Jeffrey Sconce, Associate Professor of Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University, on “The Will to Power: Technologies of Influence and Delusion in the Early Twentieth Century.”

2004 (sixth annual conference): Metropolis in the Space Between, 1914-1945, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, June 3-5.

The conference will explore the myriad and often conflicting meanings of “the city” as expressed in literature, film, photography, theater, creative reportage, history, and art history. Inspired by Fritz Lang's film, we are calling for papers that examine relationships between the many written and pictorial forms that represent the city and its artistic, rhetorical, and symbolic meanings, in a given moment or as reflecting cultural and historical change and crisis.

From Lang’s Weimar to Mina Loy’s Paris, from the Harlem Renaissance to Leni Reifenstahl’s Berlin, and from Martha Gellhorn’s Barcelona to Elizabeth Bowen’s Blitz and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, and beyond, we will examine the construction and deconstruction of such terms as habitat, haven, ghetto, and muse as well as Metropolis as the center and periphery of civilization, as the inspiration for an idealized Rural, and even as anti-Metropolis.

Keynote speaker: Janet Ward, Associate Professor of History and Director, Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on “Space, Place and Power in Modern Berlin.”

2003 (fifth annual conference): The Work of Art in the Space Between, 1914-1945, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, May 29-31.

Framed by the devastations of total war, the years 1914-1945 were marked by global social, political, economic and cultural upheaval. Amidst the on-going geo-political contestations and conflicts were the skirmishes—sometimes serious, sometimes playful—fought in the domain of art itself. Advocates for tradition and innovation clashed not only in and over the traditional arts of literature, threatre, painting, sculpture, dance and music, but also in and over the problematic valorization of new forms of art, many, such as advertising, fashion, film and photography, enabled by developments in techniques of “mechanical reproduction.”

Keynote speaker: Erika Doss, Professor of Art History and Director of American Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on issues of cultural nationalism in New Deal Art.


2001 (fourth annual meeting): Representing Regionalism, Nationalism, and Internationalism in the Space Between 1914-1945, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, May 17-19.

Keynote speaker: Jane Marcus, Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center and the City College of New York on “Putting Down the White Woman’s Burden: Michael Arlen and Mulk Raj Anand.”


2000 (third annual meeting): Constructing Literature and Culture, 1914-1945, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, May 18-20.

1998 (second annual meeting): Border Crossings in The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, New York, October 29-31.

Keynote speaker: Rita Felski, Professor of English, University of Virginia, on “Nothing to Declare: Identity, Class and Shame.”

1997 (first annual meeting): Bang, Boom, Bust, and Bang (Again), The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, October 2-4.

Keynote panelists: Kristin Bluemel, Monmouth University; Patrick Deane, University of Western Ontario; Patrick Quinn, Nene College, Northampton, on “Interwar Literature.”