Visions of Egypt
Literature and Culture from the Nineteenth Century to the Present

In Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) an Egyptologist, after
relating his part in the appropriation of the mummy of an Egyptian queen
and her transportation to Britain, muses whether 'there be any graves
for us who have robbed the grave!' The text is preoccupied with notions
of vision, as male professionals engage in the battle for the control of
this Queen, who in the novel's climactic moment dramatically resists
their voyeuristic gaze. Stoker's novel emerges, of course, at the end of
a long period of Europeans looking at and desiring to control Egypt due
to its strategic and cultural significance. Such relations are shaped by
looking, but to what extent can the gaze itself enable new visions and
new forms of cultural interaction and understanding?

In November 2011, new images emerged from Egypt as the country embarked
upon a revolution. Pictures from Tahrir Square, which itself dates from
the nineteenth century, were projected to the world's media. How is
Egypt's vision of itself and its external and internal relations
developed in art, literature and popular culture? This interdisciplinary
two-day conference, taking place at Hull History Centre and at the
University of Hull, re-examines the idea of the gaze and seeks to find
new ways of looking, and to reappraise how cultures view each other, and
themselves, beyond traditional colonial and postcolonial frameworks. The
comment of Stoker's fictional Egyptologist is a self-reflexive one and,
by looking at himself, he interrogates the notion of looking and what
looking can mean.

Possible Topics might include, but are not restricted to:

- Writings from and on Egypt from the nineteenth century to the present
- Egyptian-European cultural relations
- Travel writing and illustration
- Memoir
- Art
- Egyptology
- Modern and Contemporary Egyptian Fiction
- Victorian Popular Literature
- European Literature and Art
- New media


Abstracts focusing on the pre-1800 period are also invited.

Please send 250 word abstracts for 20 minute papers to Dr Catherine
Wynne (c.wynnehull.ac.uk) by 20 June 2013.