CFP: This Woman’s Work - A Kate Bush Symposium, Edinburgh
This Woman’s Work: A Kate Bush SymposiumThursday 12th - Friday 13th December 2019, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
Call for Papers
Deadline: 16. 09. 2019
Over forty years into her career, Kate Bush continues to make significant contributions to various fields of culture. In recent months, her back catalogue has been re-released in remastered form, and a book of collected lyrics, How To Be Invisible, was published by Faber in 2018. The University of Edinburgh is pleased to announce that it will host a two-day symposium on Bush’s achievements. This event will mark and celebrate four decades of diverse productivity and offers a space for reflection on and discussion of this woman’s work. Despite her prolific creativity since the 1970s – covering the fields of music, film and video, literature, and performance – comparatively little scholarly work has been produced on Kate Bush. This symposium aims to start rectifying this omission: the organisers intend to produce an edited anthology collection developed from symposium proceedings.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers, as well as pre-constituted panels of 2 or 3 papers, on any aspect of the career of Kate Bush. We also welcome more creative contributions in alternative presentation formats to the symposium. Topics for exploration could include, but are not limited to:
- Analyses of particular Kate Bush songs, albums, videos or performances
- Kate Bush and fashion
- Kate Bush, choreography and dance
- Kate Bush and musical genre (folk, prog, rock and others)
- Kate Bush and literature
- Kate Bush and cinema
- Kate Bush and cover versions
- Kate Bush, popular music and intertextuality
- Kate Bush, popular music and the concept album as creative and cultural artefact
- Kate Bush as producer
- Kate Bush as auteur
- Kate Bush and collaboration, from Peter Gabriel to Prince
- Kate Bush and Englishness
- Gender and sexuality in the songs and videos of Kate Bush
- Kate Bush and (lack of) live performance
- Kate Bush’s musical and cultural influence and legacy
The conference will include keynote talks, screenings, performances, cloudbusting, and other forms of running up that hill. You can follow updates relating to the conference on Facebook and Twitter.
Please send all paper/panel proposals to Jonathan Murray (jonny.murray@ed.ac.uk) by 5pm on Monday 16 September 2019. Decisions will be made by 27 September 2019, with a provisional programme to follow shortly afterwards.
This Woman’s Work: A Symposium on Kate Bush is being co-organised by The Handsome Cabin Boy Glyn Davis (glyn.davis @ ed.ac.uk) and King of the Mountain Jonny Murray.