Update on Marist Housing

An important update on housing: as a response to our earlier mailing, we tallied the number of requests for each type of housing, in the interest of letting Marist know how many rooms to save for the conference.  Due to a staffing change at Marist,  we must ask folks to stay tuned for updates on our website and Facebook page. The good news is that none of the Marist rooms have yet to be claimed. Feel free to check back with us after the new year; we imagine the Marist post will soon be filled and there will thus be someone to help us with reserving Marist rooms.  In the meantime, please feel free to consult the Marist-LdM website for hotel information: http://www.marist.edu/admission/florence/hotels.html. All good wishes and thank you for your patience.  It’s going to be a wonderful conference!

Further Update on Registration–Deadline Extended until Jan 1, 2012

Dear Friends of EW in Florence,

Please pardon these unavoidable delays–registration forms are on their way and will be posted here and on the Edith Wharton Society website soon. We have extended our registration deadline until January 1, 2012. Currently, you may visit the EWS website if you wish to update your membership or pay your registration fees via PayPal. In the interim, please forward us any questions you have. Thank you for your patience; we look forward to seeing you in Florence!

Sincerely,

Meredith Goldsmith and Emily Orlando

Co-Directors, EW in Florence

Update on Registration Information

Dear colleagues, friends, and Wharton lovers,

I have just returned from a scouting visit to Scuola Lorenzo di Medici, Marist College’s campus in Florence, and I can tell you that they are rolling out the red carpet for Edith Wharton in Florence 2012. A brief update  on our progress: We are extending the registration deadline until December 15, and are in the process of putting a PayPal site together for those who wish to pay in that manner. If your paper was accepted, you will receive a welcome email from us soon with more detailed registration information. If you did not submit a paper but are interested in attending, please contact the conference organizers, Meredith Goldsmith (mgoldsmith@ursinus.edu) and Emily Orlando (ejorlando@msn.com) and ask to be put on the list.

We also still check the edithwhartoninflorence2012@gmail.com, should you need to get in touch with us that way.

A final note: we received well over 100 proposals and were forced to turn away some that came in just a day or two after the deadline. For this reason, we are unable to entertain any more proposals at this time.

Questions? Please feel free to let us know.

Ciao, and best regards,

Meredith & Emily, EWinFlorence 2012

 

Introducing…Our Keynote Speaker

Edith Wharton in Florence is delighted to
announce that our keynote speaker will be Donna Campbell.

Campbell is associate professor of English at Washington State
University, where she has recently held the Buchanan Distinguished
Professorship (2007-2010).  Her work on Edith Wharton has focused on Wharton’s relationships to her American contemporaries and to American naturalism, including discussions of Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth in Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915 (Ohio UP, 1997; Northeast MLA Book Prize, 1995).  Recent publications on Wharton include “Edith
Wharton’s ‘Book of the Grotesque’: Sherwood Anderson, Modernism, and the Late Stories” (Edith Wharton Review,
2010); “A Literary Expatriate: Hamlin Garland, Edith Wharton, and the Politicsof a Literary Reputation” (Edith Wharton
Review, 2008); “Edith Wharton: Short Stories,” in A Companion to the American Short Story (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009);
“Where are the ladies? Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and American Women Naturalists” (Studies in American
Naturalism, 2006); and “The ‘bitter taste’ of Naturalism: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and David Graham
Phillips’s Susan Lenox” (Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on
American Literary Naturalism, 2003).  Other work includes “Edith Wharton and the ‘Authoresses: The Critique of Local Color in Wharton’s Early Fiction” (Studies in American Fiction, 1994),  an introduction to the Northeastern University Press edition of The Fruit of the Tree (2000), and an interview for The Secret Life of
Edith Wharton, a documentary to accompany Lucasfilm’s “Young Indy” DVD series reissue (2007).  She received the Edith Wharton Society Research Award in 2009 for her project, “Wharton and the Transnational Body: Gabrielle Landormy, Citizenship, and Modernity in the Late Works of Edith Wharton.” She currently holds an Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship (2011) at the Lilly Library of Indiana University for “Cinema, Technology, and Modern Visual Culture in the Fiction of Edith Wharton,” and Wharton features prominently in all the chapters of her current book
project Bitter Tastes: Naturalism, Early Film, and American Women’s Writing. A past president of the Edith Wharton Society, she created its web site in 1999 and continues to serve as webmaster.

Edith Wharton in Florence 2012: Now on Facebook, too

If you’re a Facebook user, you can join our page on Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/EWinFlorence2012.

 

Call for Papers: Edith Wharton in Florence 2012

Conference Dates: June 6-8, 2012

Please join us for the international conference of the Edith Wharton Society in Florence, Italy, celebrating the sesquicentennial of Wharton’s birth. “Edith Wharton in Florence” will be the third Wharton Society conference held in Europe and the first in Italy. The conference directors seek papers focusing on all aspects of Wharton’s work, and we especially welcome submissions dealing with the international contexts of her writing.

Papers might offer readings of any of Wharton’s texts, including the following:

• short fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and travel writing, in addition to the novels;
• Wharton’s work in relation to any of its nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts;
• Wharton in a transatlantic literary context;
• Wharton and her contemporaries, both male and female, canonical and non-canonical, European and American;
• Wharton in Italy, Morocco, and elsewhere in Europe;
• Wharton and the other arts, including painting, photography, theatre, and film (adaptations of her work during her lifetime and those that have appeared more recently);
• Wharton and cosmopolitanism, globalization, and the various forces of modernity;
• Wharton and art history.

All theoretical approaches welcome, including feminist, psychoanalytic, historicist, marxist, queer, and ecocritical, among others.

Through the generosity of Marist College, the conference will be held at Marist’s Lorenzo di Medici campus, in the heart of Florence. In addition to panels, there will be a keynote speaker and opportunities for tours of the area. Conference venue: http://www.marist.edu/academics/italy/ldm.html
Please submit 250-500-word abstracts and brief CV to EdithWhartoninFlorence2012@gmail.com
by 15 July 2011.
All conference participants must be members of the Edith Wharton Society
at the time of registration.
For more information about the conference, contact Conference Directors
Meredith Goldsmith (Ursinus College; mgoldsmith@ursinus.edu) and
Emily Orlando (Fairfield University; eorlando@fairfield.edu).