Sebald Symposium in London November 29, 2018

Leonardo da Vinci, Whirlpools of Water. Windsor, Royal Library.

The Institute of Advance Studies at University College London has announced a one-day symposium on W.G. Sebald. There is a call for papers “on any aspect of turbulence, in the widest sense.” Proposals are due November 8.

Call for Papers

Turbulence: The Work of W.G. Sebald

An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), UCL, London, 29 November 2018

This symposium explores the theme of turbulence in the literary work of W.G. Sebald (1944-2001), from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Sebald’s work is celebrated for its rich and complex accounts of journeys, including by air, a mode of travel which we commonly associate with the distinctive feeling of turbulence. In addition however, our enquiry considers the idea of turbulence in wider senses. We link it for instance to the vertiginous sensations of travel in general in this writing, and recognise that turbulence may not end on arrival, for a destination, once reached, can itself seem disorienting and to shift in uncanny ways. We are interested too in turbulent experiences of travels into the past, memory and intertextuality; and those produced for the reader by Sebald’s complex poetics and narrative techniques. Crucially too, we will investigate the multi-disciplinary, multilingual travels which Sebald’s writing undertakes into new languages, media, forms and contexts as other artists engage with it in their own work, and we look forward to conversations with distinguished practitioners in a variety of fields. 

Speakers include poet Stephen Watts; novelist, academic and critic Angharad Price (Prifysgol Bangor) and visual artist Simon Faithfull (Slade School of Fine Art).

Our symposium will be followed on the morning of Friday 30 November by an exploration of parts of the East London featured in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, on a guided walk with Stephen Watts and David Anderson (UCL).

 Call for Papers

We invite twenty-minute papers on any aspect of turbulence, in the widest sense, and attendant phenomena in the work of W.G. Sebald and others. We are especially interested in submissions which address interdisciplinary and comparative aspects of our themes.

Please submit an abstract (200 words) and a short biography (100 words) to Mererid Puw Davies, Department of German / SELCS, UCL (mererid.davies@ucl.ac.uk), by 8 November 2018. Speakers will be notified by 12 November 2018. 

Registration and Further Details

Both the symposium and the walk are free to attend. All are welcome and online registration will open soon. In the meantime, please send any questions or register your attendance with an email to mererid.davies@ucl.ac.uk.