FORUM, the University of Edinburgh’s Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, is pleased to announce its third conference which will explore the theme of editing. This conference invites participants to explore the variety of practices and concepts of editing across disciplines and as they appear in different historical and cultural contexts, as well as to reflect on the opportunities, goals and challenges of contemporary editing and publishing. A number of papers by postgraduate participants will be selected to be published in the December 2013 issue of FORUM.

The dynamic life of cultural products is often masked by illusions of textual stability. Processes of editing have always had a radical impact on the arts and their reception; from Herodotus’s ‘editing’ of history, the editing of Chaucer's brilliant but foul language, Beardsley's censored drawings in Wilde's editions, Luis Buñuel's unique montage editing to the work of Venuti and the rise of disciplines such as History of the Book. Furthermore, current economic pressures and rapid technological changes raise the question of the future of the ‘text’ in a digital age.

Editing is also constitutive of academic life – whether it be as part of a postgraduate journal, in major projects such as producing critical editions or as a process we all go through in publishing our own research. With this in mind workshops on editorial practice will be organised alongside more conventional talks to provide the opportunity for participants to enhance their employability skills.

We welcome papers from fields across the humanities (including film, music and visual art as we wish to examine text in the broadest sense). Papers may be submitted individually or collectively as themed panels. Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:

• theories and practices of editing in any potential time period
• theories and practices of editing in cross-cultural perspective or in contexts outside Europe
• issues of authorship
• power relations and editorial impact
• editing selves; auto/biographical writing; censorship or self-censorship)
• cultural editing, rewriting, imitation and repetition
• editing as a literary technique (framing narratives, fake forewords, false editing)
• editing and film, music and visual art
• editing manuscripts, critical editions, and archival material
• the humanities in a digital age
• biological and computational methods in literary scholarship

Presentations should take the form of 20 minute papers. Please send titled abstracts of up to 300 words along with a brief biographical statement to forum.conference.edit@gmail.com no later than February 18th 2013. Please do not hesitate to email us if you have any questions about the event. 

FORUM website: https://forumjournal.org

Programme: here