Program of the 28th SNSBI Spring Conference 2019

The 28th annual conference of the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland will take place at the University of Nottingham from 26 to 29 April 2019. The University of Nottingham is home to the Institute for Name-Studies and has a long-standing connection with the field, housing the library and offices of the English Place-Name Society for over fifty years. The conference will bring together papers on a wide range of topics from Britain, Ireland and further afield, including the Cameron Lecture, to be given by Professor Lesley Abrams on the Saturday evening.

The program and abstracts can be found here.

Call for Papers: They, Hirself, Em, and You: Nonbinary pronouns in research and practice, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada, June 11-13 2019

They, Hirself, Xem, and You (THEY) is a three-day conference bringing together linguists and other researchers and practitioners working on topics relating to nonbinary pronouns in English. The conference will be held at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada, June 11-13 2019. The goal of this conference is to bring together researchers working on topics relating to nonbinary gender (usage, users, and user experiences) in language, particularly in pronouns, in order to both raise the profile of this research within linguistics and other disciplines, and to build resources that can be used by educators, policy makers, community advocates, and researchers in other fields. Admission to the conference will be free.

It will include two interleaved tracks of talks and presentations: one featuring research from linguistics (L-track), and one featuring scholars and practitioners from other fields (O-track). There will also be a series of four invited keynote talks, open to the public, and one of the conference outputs will be a resource compiling information and resources on nonbinary pronouns, for general use. Please see the conference website for more information.

L-track proposals are due March 31, 2019.

O-track proposals are due April 30, 2019.

A downloadable Call for Papers can be found here.

Call for Papers: 2019 Geographic Names Conference of COGNA, Baton Rouge, LA, August 5-9 2019

The 2019 Geographic Names Conference of COGNA (Council of Geographic Names Authorities in the United States) will take place August 5-9, 2019, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They are seeking presentation content, geographic names in nature, including regional topics, toponymic and cartographic themes encouraged. Presentations are for individual presentations or panel discussions.

This conference is the only conference that brings together the State Geographic Names Authorities (SNAs) and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) and provides participants a unique opportunity to share information and knowledge about the geographic naming process and research. There is no better way to network and benefit from the expertise of members and staff of the BGN, SNAs, Tribal authorities, other State and Federal mapping agencies, and members of the geospatial and academic communities.

The conferences are open to the public for registration fees. Registration fees included all conference materials, welcome & closing receptions, and admission to all daytime conference sessions. Conferences conclude with an optional an educational-toponymic field workshop.

You can download the call for papers here. The deadline for abstracts is April 30, 2019.

Additional information on the conference is available at their website.

1st Session of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, April 29 – May 3, 2019, New York

The 2019 Session of the “new” United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) will be convened from 29 April to 3 May 2019 at the UNHQ, in New York.

The session, organized by the United Nations Statistics Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, brings together over 150 experts from national naming authorities and academia. The 2019 session heralds the first session of the new body, with a new agenda and over 90 papers for information and discussion, covering topics such as toponymic training, place names supporting sustainable development, toponymic data files and gazetteers, romanization systems, exonyms, geographical names as cultural heritage, and toponymic guidelines for map and other editors for international use.

Call for Papers for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference, Seattle, WA, January 9-12, 2020

ANS Panel at the Modern Language Association Conference

January 9-12th, 2020 in Seattle, WA

The American Name Society is inviting abstract proposals for a panel with the literary theme “Semantic relations and personal names.” Names have meanings. They bear specific semantic connotations that, albeit forgotten by their users, are exploited by authors to evoke subsequent layers of interpretation. Papers of this panel will explore this practice and investigate how meanings of names are employed and to what ends, with a focus either on specific authors or with a broader scope. Examples of themes that can be addressed may be semantics of names in literary theory, name choices due to semantic connotations, intertextual relations based on the meaning of names, etc.

For more information about MLA 2020, check out the official website.

Proposal submission process:

Abstracts proposals of up to 400 words should be sent as an email attachment (PDF format) to Dr. Andreas Gavrielatos (gavrielatos@reading.ac.uk).
Proposals should include “MLA proposal” in the subject line of the email.
All submissions must include an abstract title, the full name(s) of the author(s), the author affiliation, and email address in the body of the email and NOT with the abstract.
DEADLINE: Proposals must be received by 5pm GMT on 31 March 2019. Authors will be notified about results of the blind review on or by 03 April 2019.
Contributors selected for the thematic panel must be members of both MLA and ANS in order to present their papers.
For further information, please contact Dr A. Gavrielatos (gavrielatos@reading.ac.uk).

More information about ANS and MLA conferences in available on the Conferences page of this website.

Lecture: The Crimean toponymy in Ukraine, Berlin (Germany), March 14, 2019

The German-Ukrainian Academic Society cordially invites you to their next lecture “The Crimean toponymy in Ukraine: living evidence of the centuries-old interactions between Crimea and the mainland Ukraine”. What relations exist between “decommunization”, historical toponymy, and how Ukrainian society perceives the changes of geographical names? What lessons could we learn from this complex story? Lecture will be given in Ukrainian by Roman Alieiev, engineer at the Research department of MAN Truck & Bus AG, PhD student at the Technical University of Braunschweig.

When: Thursday, 14 March 2019, 18:00 – 19:30 (entry from 17:30 onwards)

Where: Embassy of Ukraine, Albrechtstraße 26, 10117 Berlin

International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo MI, May 9-12 2019

Hosted by the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University, the International Congress on Medieval Studies is an annual gathering of around 3,000 scholars interested in medieval studies. The congress features more than 550 sessions of papers, panel discussions, roundtables, workshops, demonstrations, performances, and poster sessions. There are also some 100 business meetings and receptions sponsored by learned societies, associations and institutions. The exhibits hall boasts nearly 70 exhibitors, including publishers, used book dealers and purveyors of medieval sundries. The congress lasts three and a half days, extending from Thursday morning, with sessions beginning at 10 a.m., until Sunday at noon.

The Congress takes place on the campus of Western Michigan University on May 9 to 12, 2019. Registration is online.

There are several panels and papers on onomastics, including:

“Nomen est omen”: A Roundtable on Names and Nicknames in the Middle Ages
Obscure Names: Reimagining Origins in the Lais of Marie de France
Ethnic Minorities in Medieval Palencia as Evidenced by Personal Names: The Jews of Dueñas and Aguilar
Arthurian Names
The Fairy Queens: Invocation of Fairy Tradition in the Names of Guinevere and Morgan le Fay
“What’s in a name?”: Experimental Archaeologist or Re-Enactor: Who are We?
Britons amongst Hebrews: Two Brythonic Names in Melech Artus

The full program can be found here.

Call for papers: 21st Slovak International Onomastic Conference “Proper Names in the Interdisciplinary Context”

The scholars from the Eastern Europe organize the 21st Slovak Onomastic Conference around the topic “Proper Names in the Interdisciplinary Context”. It will be held in Nitra at the Constantine the Philosopher University, in September 10-12, 2019.

The conference topics are:

1. Theoretical issues of onomastics (interrelationship with various disciplines such as history, archeology, geography, law, economics, psychology, sociology, literary science, aesthetics, semiotics, translatology, etc.);

2. Analysis of different kinds of proper names;

3. Onomastic terminology (literary onomastics, socio-onomastics, psycho-onomastics, areal onomastics, onomastic semantics, etc.)

Please send your applications forms until April 30, 2019 by email to onomastika2019@gmail.com

Call for Papers: Language and Identity: Intersections between Linguistics, Ethnology and Translation, Aberdeen, Scotland, March 30 2019

The Identity and Language Conference Committee at the University of Aberdeen has put out a call for papers for their one-day event, Language and Identity: Intersections between Linguistics, Ethnology and Translation. It will be held at Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, Saturday 30th March 2019.

In today’s modern society we develop identities related to our use of language, not only in relation to code switching within our native languages, but also across different languages. At the same time as individuals are gaining multiple identities through language acquisition, others are losing their identities to decreased use or extinction of their native tongues. Through globalisation the population of the world is interacting more across linguistic and cultural boundaries than ever before: through learning foreign languages and reading translated texts. How does this increased interaction with other languages affect our identities?

Please visit the official call for papers for more information.

Deadline for abstract submission: Monday 25th February, 5pm

Oxford Seminars in Cartography: Rivers and Ice: Early Modern Maps of the Far North, Oxford, UK, January 24 2019

The Oxford Seminars in Cartography will be holding a special lecture entitled “Rivers and Ice: Early Modern Maps of the Far North” which will be given by Charlotta Forss (Bodleian Libraries and Stockholms Universitet). The lecture will take place on January 24, 2019. The seminar is scheduled to run from 4:30 to 6:00pm in the Weston Library Theatre on Broad Street in Oxford, England. Booking is essential – for further details, please contact: Nick Millea [nick.millea@bodleian.ox.ac.uk] The Oxford Seminars in Cartography is supported by a conglomerate of scholarly organizations such as the British Cartographic Society and the Oxford Cartographers.