The Department of Anglo-American and German Studies

at

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu,
 

The Centre for Anglo-American and German Research

and

University of Wolverhampton’s Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research

are pleased to invite you to the

Craving Planet Earth:
Food in Culture - Past, Present and Future

International Conference
Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu,
7-9 November 2019

Invited Speakers include:

Daisy Black (University of Wolverhampton, UK)
Peter Childs (Newman University, Birmingham, UK)
Sebastian Groes (University of Wolverhampton, UK)

Conference includes a psychological olfactory experiment organized by the AHRC- and Wellcome Trust-funded research project The Memory Network: Proust in Transylvania.

On behalf of the Faculty of Letters and Arts at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania and the University of Wolverhampton’s Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research, it gives us great pleasure to invite you to an international conference: Craving Planet Earth: Food in Culture – Past, Present and Future. The conference chimes in nicely with Sibiu’s selection as the European Region of Gastronomy for 2019, but is primarily to ask pressing questions about significant issues such as climate change and food production, the refugee crisis and labor migration, sustainable agriculture and the ethical distribution of the earth’s resources. Given the centrality of food to human life and survival, and recurring anxieties about the depletion of the land as a result of growing populations or other forms of crisis such as global warming, representations of food and starvation are abundant in world literature. This conference explores the intricacies and complexities of food in culture.

The event is the next edition of the East-West Cultural Passage international conference (http://conferences.ulbsibiu.ro/eastwest/index.htm), organized biennially by the Department of Anglo-American Studies at LBUS. This special edition will celebrate 50 years of philological and anglophone studies at LBUS. It will be a great opportunity for Sibiu’s researchers to showcase their recent work and network with international specialists in various fields of the humanities. It will also be an opportunity for our scholarly journals, particularly East-West Cultural Passage, to attract valuable international contributions. Lucian Blaga University organizes this conference in collaboration with the Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research (CTTR), University of Wolverhampton, UK. CTTR provides a platform for Wolverhampton’s humanities scholars to promote their research. For more information, see https://www.wlv.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/cttr---centre-for-transnational-and-transcultural-research/

Participation by specialists in literature, modern languages and cultural studies, as well as the arts and humanities more widely, is warmly encouraged. Papers are delivered in English and could address (but are by no means limited to) topics such as:

• Representations of food in literature, film, painting etc, from Shakespeare to Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover;
• Food, the body and the senses;
• Feasting/fasting: globalisation, migration and changing eating habits; cultures of eating, tradition and change, such as, for example, Kafka’s ‘Hunger Artist’ and Nicola Barker’s Clear;
• “Eat, Pray, Love”: representations of hospitality in travel writing;
• Historical instances of famine and starvation: the Irish Potato Famine, the Holocaust etc.; eating/starvation in crisis situations;
• Nature/ nurture and the intersectionality of identity;
• Food and global warming: an ecology of food and sustainability;
• The ethics and aesthetics of consumption and capitalism;
• Growing bigger and growing differently: overpopulation, dystopias and posthumanism;
• Anorexia, other eating disorders and mental health in contemporary fiction and film; fashion and body image;
• Food as spectacle: food in the (social) media, such as The Great British Bake-off, etc.;
• Ordering like a connoisseur: food, gluttony and frugality in translation.  

Presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes, allowing for 10 minutes of discussion.

Paper/ panel/ workshop proposals should include an abstract (no more than 200 words), a list of 5-7 keywords, and a short biographical note in word format, along with titles of papers/ panels, name and institutional affiliation, mailing address, phone, and e-mail address of the participant(s).

Please send your proposals in the field of literary studies to Anca-Luminiţa Iancu (anca.iancu@ulbsibiu.ro) and paper proposals in the fields of language, translation and cultural studies to Anca Ignat (anca.tomus@ulbsibiu.ro).

Deadline for submission of proposals: 1 May 2019

At the heart of the European Region of Gastronomy for 2019 (http://europeanregionofgastronomy.org/regions/sibiu-2019), Sibiu is the ideal location to discuss the role of food in culture. Situated in southern Transylvania, Sibiu combines the culinary cultures of the various ethnic groups which have inhabited it since the Middle Ages (Romanians, Germans, Hungarians, Jews, Roma etc.), and newer cuisines that include Indian, Chinese, French, Italian, and Portuguese. In 2007, it was the European Capital of Culture. Sibiu enjoys a rich cultural history: it boasts a magnificent art gallery, the Brukenthal Museum (http://www.brukenthalmuseum.ro), and it is surrounded by medieval fortified churches (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/596/gallery/). If we are to believe Jeremy Clarkson, the most amazing road – the Transfăgărășan highway – is just around the corner (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq4ydUVgYTY).

A selection of the papers presented will be published in a special issue of East/West Cultural Passage (http://magazines.ulbsibiu.ro/ewcp/index.htm).

Conference fee: 190 Lei for AASR members / 235 Lei for non-members / 140 Lei for doctoral students (40 Euros for AASR members / 50 Euros for non-members / 30 Euros for doctoral students), to be paid upon arrival. The fee covers coffee-breaks, lunches and conference portfolios.

Conference venue:
Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu
Faculty of Letters and Arts
Department of Anglo-American and German Studies
5-7 Victoriei Bvd.
Sibiu, 550024, Romania

For further information please contact Dr Ana-Karina Schneider (karina.schneider@ulbsibiu.ro) and Professor Sebastian Groes (s.groes@wlv.ac.uk).

We look forward to welcoming you to Sibiu!

For further details and updates, please visit us at http://conferences.ulbsibiu.ro/eastwest/index.htm and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Academic-Anglophone-Society-of-Romania/221613231184438