Mathilde Poizat-Amar, lecturer in French from the Department of Modern Languages, has received a funding award from the Association Victor Segalen and the Society of French Studies for a conference on Victor Segalen. The conference will take place at the University of Kent on 22 April 2016.

Victor Segalen (1878-1919) is a French writer, poet, doctor and archaeologist who wrote extensively on his travels to French Polynesia and China and contributed to shift the understanding of exoticism and the Otherness at the beginning of the 20th century.

This one-day conference aims at inviting established scholars and early-career scholars to question and think about the relevance of segalenian studies almost 100 years after he died. How do we read, how do we think with Segalen in 2016? The communications will deepen knowledge and explore new ways of thinking about Segalen’s work, and thinking with his work. They will focus on the following aspects of his writing:

• Legacy of Victor Segalen
• Distance, heterogeneity and exoticism
• The Other, the Elsewhere and the Self
• Reality and Imagination
• The Body
• Text and critical theory
• Origins and destinations
• Poetics of the text

Please send a 300-word abstract (in English or French) with a short biography by the 15 January 2016 to this address: conferencevictorsegalen@gmail.com. Communications should not exceed 20 minutes.

Further details and the full call for papers is available at: www.fabula.org/actualites/journee-d-etude-victor-segalen_69405.php