The winners of the John Dryden Translation Competition for 2017-18 have been announced. The jury has evaluated translations from a range of languages into English and awarded the following:

First prize:
Colin Bramwell and Wen-Chi Li for Selections from the poetry of Yang Mu from the Chinese of Yang Mu’s (出發)給名名的十四行詩.

Second prize:
Adam Sorkin and Diana Manolefor A-Z.best (Selections) from the Romanian of Emilian Galaicu-Păun’s A-Z.best.

Third prize:
Kseniia Vitalievna Bogdanova for The Legend of Larra of the Staff from the Russian of Maxim Gorky’s Легенда о Ларре.

Commendation:
Paul Melo e Castro for Raw Muscle from the Portuguese of Rubem Fonseca’s (A Força Humana.)

The following entries were also shortlisted for the prize:

Lindy Falk van Rooyen for Up Close & Distant (excerpt) from the Danish of Dorrit Willumsen’s Nær og fjern.

Laura Shanahan for The End of the Set Phrases (and of Sally Moore’s Life) from the Italian of Viola di Grado’s La fine delle frasi fatte (e della vita di Sally Moore).

Matthew Hyde for Hanuman’s Journey to Lolland (excerpt) from the Russian of Andrei Ivanov’s Путешествие Ханумана на Лолланд.

Bella Bosworth for Letters from Mamá from the Spanish of Julio Cortázar’s Cartas de mamá.

Many thanks to everyone who entered the competition.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Helen King (Professor Emerita of Classical Studies, Open University).

(De)Constructing Masculinity is a one-day interdisciplinary conference on the theme of masculinity in the Greco-Roman world, generously funded and supported by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP).

What did it mean to be a man in the ancient world? And what did it mean for an individual to fall short of the criteria for manliness?

These questions will form the foundation of (De)Constructing Masculinity as it seeks to explore various constructions of masculinity in ancient Greco-Roman literature and the ways in which hegemonic masculinity is challenged or affirmed by these gender expressions. (De)Constructing Masculinity is also firmly intended as an interdisciplinary conference with the aim of encouraging conversations between researchers in the fields of Classics, Comparative Literature and Theology given the wealth of materials that these disciplines share.

We welcome abstracts of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers by postgraduate students and early career researchers. All abstracts must be sent in PDF format to deconstructingmasculinity2018@outlook.com no later than 30th June 2018 (EOD). All applicants will be informed of the outcome of their submissions by 14th July 2018. We will also accept proposals for complete panels of up to 3 papers. Suggested themes for both panels and individual papers include, but are by no means limited to:

– Performing masculinity and male sexuality in and through ancient literature
– Literary representations of problematic male bodies
– Subversive representations of male archetypes, e.g. soldier, statesman, citizen, athlete, father, religious leader etc.
– Male authorship and the dynamics of gendered canonisation in literary traditions
– Political loss and its effect upon collective and individual notions of masculinity
– The appropriation of female imagery and language by male writers
– Women performing masculinity in and through ancient literature
– The implications of literary manifestations of gender androgyny
– The role of men and masculine status in the New Testament and other early Christian writings
– Comparative analysis of any of the above themes within Greco-Roman and early Christian literature.

If you have any questions or queries, please do not hesitate to contact the conference team at deconstructingmasculinity2018@outlook.com. For further information about the conference and about registering your interest in attending, please see our website at http://www.deconstructingmasculinity2018.co.uk. (De)Constructing Masculinity Conference

The beach has recently become the site of important transformations: understood in the context of mass tourism for many years, nowadays we perceive the beach as bearing witness to the arrival of refugees, to pollution and climate change (e.g. tsunamis, rising sea levels), and to a growing number of sociocultural conflicts (e.g. over dress codes as in the case of burkini / nudist debates). As an area of unregulated movement as well as an institutional / institutionalized border, the beach receives growing media interest, but still remains at the periphery of maritime studies in academia. To do justice to the complex spatial concepts, dynamics, practices, and aesthetics of the beach, the international conference ›Narrating and Constructing the Beach‹ views it as a (border) phenomenon in its own right and sets out to analyze it systematically and historically.
The (European) »invention of the beach«, which Alain Corbin situates approximately in the 18th century, is connected to a myriad of discourses and practices which crystallize at, and are projected onto, the beach. In this respect, the conference will trace the manifold, changing, and at times competing representations and experiences of the beach in artwork, culture, and society as well as the many cultural imaginaries of the beach in their global and historical diversity. One focal point will concern the techniques employed to narrate, construct, and reshape ›the beach‹: it is our cultural, artistic, and perceptual practices that produce the beach as an ever changing aesthetic, sociocultural, political, historical, and also geographic space. As such, the beach is at once liminal and multiple, determined by the juxtaposition of land, ocean and sky as well as the blurring of the lines that separate them. It can turn from a representational space to a living space, and is at times perceived as a non-place or a heterotopia.
From differing and decidedly interdisciplinary research perspectives, the conference also inquires into how ways of experiencing the beach interact with sociocultural body practices and markers of difference (such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, age, dis/ability, etc.): locals and travelers alike can perceive the beach as a space of encounter with the – erotic or dangerous – other, leading to (transitory) loss or vehement demarcation of the self. Contributing practices include Grand Tours, medical / health retreats, beach pastimes (swimming, promenading, building sand castles, collecting seashells as well as flotsam and jetsam), (mass-)touristic colonization, gender specific productions of subspaces (e.g. through towels, gazes), or the artificial incorporation of beaches into cities. Contributions could investigate these and other aspects from the point of view of changing cultural, medial, or aesthetic forms.
But even when not thinking of such sociocultural ties, the beach remains a fluid and a non-localizable space which constitutes itself mainly via relations: for example, it is dependent on, yet also autonomous from, the sea and water, the harbor, urban structures, and other forms of the shore and the coast. The beach can be read in analogy or opposition to the harbor when representing the clandestine or the disturbances and disruptions in global systems of institutionalized trade currents and travel itineraries. To reach the beach might, thus, result from going astray, evading the harbor, or missing it – from being stranded. By analyzing the establishment of sanatoriums, the regulation of trade, tourism or migration, presentations could detail how processes of order and institutionalization remain (in)visible, how they (temporarily) establish structures, or even how they are in vain.
While the conference is interested in how these liminal and multiple border spaces are narrated and constructed by sociocultural practices, it also investigates how beaches are generated by literature, music, theater, performance, film, photography, and art as (aesthetic) spaces and in which ways ›the beach‹ shapes and transforms both poetics and aesthetics.
We thus invite contributions from all fields interested in cultural studies and pertaining to all epochs and places around the globe to analyze beaches as cultural artifacts or in cultural artifacts. Researchers can take into account the connections and interactions between the discursive conditions of the beach, its aesthetic dimensions, and its historical and cultural practices.
Abstracts in English or German (300-500 words) for a 30-minute presentation and a subsequent 15-minute discussion can be submitted with a short academic C.V. by January 14, 2018 to the following email address: beach.conference@lmu.de. Submissions should not have been previously published as we plan to publish the conference proceedings. Please indicate whether you might be comfortable speaking in English and/or German so we can find a balance between both conference languages.

Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
Organization: Graduate School Language & Literature – Class of Literature
Team: Stefan Brückl, Ines Ghalleb, Dominik Pensel, Roxanne Phillips, Katharina Simon, Florian Telsnig
beach.conference@lmu.de
http://www.en.prolit.uni-muenchen.de/projects/conference/index.html
Organized in cooperation with the Bavarian American Academy and the Amerikahaus Munich: http://www.amerikahaus.de/

Conference Announcement Narrating and Constructing the Beach (LMU Munich)

Our Theatre Company
Praxis (in Greek ‘Πράξις’, meaning ‘The Act’) was established in 2013, with a vision to promote contemporary Greek theatre. Ancient Greece was the birthplace of theatre. Everyone is familiar with the work of Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes. But what about modern Greece, what about art in Greece of indebtedness, austerity, unemployment? In fact, modern Greece has its own theatrical legacy. Praxis is proud to be the first team to introduce contemporary GreSplinters_flyer_ek theatre in its original language with English surtitles to the Oxford audience. Since our début, in May 2014, we have been annually presenting the newest contemporary Greek theatre pieces with great success.
Our play
This year’s production, ‘Splinters’, is a brand-new work by Nina Rapi, firstly performed in Athens in January 2018. Praxis, under the direction of Anastasia Revi, are translating ‘Splinters’ and presenting it for the very first time in the UK. An ensemble of seven short stories, ‘Splinters’ is a play about human relationships. 7 dialogues among friends, lovers, family members or internal, self-dialogues, that bring to light the never-ending quest for happiness, freedom, self-conscience and identity through our day to day interactions. The struggle between solitude and co-existence, between the self and the other.
Tickets
Where: Simpkins Lee Theatre, Lady Margaret Hall College, Oxford, OX2 6QA
When: 31st May – 1st June – 2nd June
Tickets: £12 (£7 concessions).
Bookings: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/splinters-by-praxis-tickets-45657509841

Splinters by PRAXIS Tickets, Multiple Dates | Eventbrite
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk
Splinters are the small pieces of wood that penetrate the skin, or the fragments of a shattered impression. 7 short stories that together synthesise an ensemble, a play about human relationships. 7 dialogues among friends, lovers, family members or internal, self-dialogues, that bring to light the …

Contact
Email: praxistheatre.info@gmail.com | Website: https://www.praxisoxford.org | Facebook: Praxis Oxford Greek Theatre Group

Two of the best-known writers from the Spanish-speaking world will be discussing the state of the modern novel. In a discussion chaired by Matthew Reynolds, Javier Cercas and Juan Gabriel Vásquez will be talking about their work, auto-fiction and the development of the novel over the course of the last century.

http://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/javier-cercas-juan-gabriel-vasquez-conversation