Words and images have always been used to fashion, refashion and challenge identities. In the age of discovery, written and visual texts combined to negotiate identities of self and other; the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw an explosion of visual technologies. In the early twenty-first century, our lives have become more permeated by multimedial texts and images than ever before. 
This two-day symposium hosted by the English Department at the University of Zurich aims to explore the constitution of personal, national and cultural identities at the intersection of the verbal and the visual. It will focus on the multiple relations between identities, words and images, addressing issues such as visual culture, transmediality, iconicity, and the materialities of words and images. 
The conference is primarily aimed at scholars working in the field of literary and cultural studies. However, as we believe issues of visuality can be fruitfully examined in an interdisciplinary framework, we invite contributions from different segments of the academic community.

We welcome submissions for 20-minute papers in English that may address, but need not be limited to, the following areas:

  • Visuality in literature and the arts 
  • Verbal texts in images 
  • Visual images in verbal texts 
  • Theories of visual culture 
  • Space and vision 
  • Graphic novels, comics and other hybrid texts 
  • Visuality and book cultures in the digital age 
  • Transmedial and crossmedial texts 
  • Intersections of word and image in politics 
  • Semiotics of the visual 
  • Iconicity 
  • Visuality and material culture 
  • Cartography and maps 
  • Words and images in advertising 
  • Phenomenologies of the visual 
  • Visuality and architecture

Keynote speakers

Prof. Dr. Kath Woodward (Milton Keynes) 
Prof. Dr. Chris Morash (Dublin)

Please send an abstract of 200-300 words and a short biographical note to Johannes Riquet (johannes.riquet at es.uzh.ch) in a single file (in both Word and PDF formats). Please use exactly the following subject heading: IDIMAGES_abstract

Deadline for proposals: 28 November 2014

Submitters will be notified of acceptance or rejection by 6 December 2014.

Prof. Dr. Martin Heusser 
Dr. des. Johannes Riquet

English Department, University of Zurich