In section XII of “The Bounty of Sweden”, published transatlantically in both the London Mercury and The Dial in September 1924, Yeats (in)famously conjures two forms to stand at his side onstage at the Swedish Academy: “When your King gave me medal and diploma, two forms should have stood, one at either side of me, an old woman sinking into the infirmity of age and a young man’s ghost.” (Au 535). By invoking JM Synge and Augusta Gregory, Yeats highlights the importance of collaboration in organised movements, societies, and schools in order to effect cultural and social change. Etymologically, coniuro in Latin and its later descendants maintain the prefix con-, indicating that whoever conjures, swears with others, in a conspiracy of at least two. From as early as his swearing into the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the 1880s, throughout his life Yeats was certainly a conjurer in this more archaic sense, as someone who bound himself to others even as he posed as the outcast poet. Creating and dissolving organisations, log-rolling with friends’ publications, shifting allegiances, staging coups and joining splinter groups, in his many arenas of action Yeats attempted to influence the world around him by collective effort.
As a theme for the hybrid 2024 International Yeats Society Conference, Conjuring Yeats comes to the Minas Gerais, the homeplace of the “Conjuração Mineira”, an early separatist movement that sought to create an independent republic in the province of Minas Gerais. Its repression by the Portuguese Crown and the plight of the “conjurates” was incommensurate, and although other rebels had their sentences commuted, the public hanging of its main instigator, known as Tiradentes (or Toothpuller, as Elizabeth Bishop, herself a longtime resident of Ouro Preto, called him), on the 21st of April 1792 took on the Christological imagery later associated to Ireland’s own Easter Rising of 1916.
This conference will address a variety of topics, including but not limited to the following:
- Yeats, organisations, and secret societies, including political parties;
- Yeats’s conspirators & collaborators, members of the Irish Revival or modernist cliques;
- Yeats, rebellion and political strife;
- Yeats, magic, and belief;
- Conjuring in non-anglophone contexts: translation and edition as transmutation;
- The theatrical stage as a space of conjuration
- Other writers haunted by Yeats or the Minas Gerais “conjurates”. The conference will be hybrid and the in-person events will take place primarily on the Humanities premises of the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, in the city of Mariana. Online participation includes:
- Individual paper participation in fully online or hybrid panels;
- Participation in full panel proposed as a group, either fully online or hybrid;
- Remote attendance to online and hybrid panels as well as keynotes. There will also be two different time slots available for remote panels: one in the morning and one in the afternoon, to cater for different time zones (we are in BRT zone, at GMT-3).
Keynotes by Neil Mann (researcher, Finland) and Bruce Stewart (UFRN, Brazil), roundtable with Ragini Mohite (FLAME University, India) and Barry Sheils (Durham University, UK), a new voices lecture by Charika Swanepoel (Turku University, Finland), and pocket performance and interview with the creators of the new adaptation of At the Hawk’s Well in Brazil, Emilie Sugai and Fabio Mazzoni (in Portuguese with consecutive translation).
Please submit proposals for individual papers, group panels or banners to the organising committee via this form by November 10th:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd6bpR3JWNbWItYrMDkbfR5WqA-RFTYGD636WFFxAzVUGMJxg/viewform
If you encounter any problems, please email yeatsbrazil@ufop.edu.br. More information is available on the conference website, https://yeatsbrazil.ufop.br/, and on our Instagram @yeatsbrazil_.
We are keen to support students and academics who are not employed full-time or work in public universities. Conference costs are kept to a minimum and will be as follows, payable by credit card (via IYS), PIX (for Brazilians) or transfer (please contact Rita at m.rita.viana@ufop.edu.br):
A pre-conference excursion to the Inhotim Museum in Brumadinho can be arranged for all interested attendees on the Sunday before the event, December 8. More information is available on the conference website. If you intend to attend the pre-conference excursion, please plan to arrive in Belo Horizonte by December 7 and stay overnight because we leave for Inhotim early on Sunday.
The IYS membership supports students by offering travel bursaries. The bursary is paid up to 800 euros as reimbursement on expenses incurred. If you would like to be considered for the IYS travel bursary please include your abstract, a maximum 200-word statement outlining your case for support to the presidency (Charles.Armstrong@uia.no). This should include detail about your current research project and the relevance of the conference to your ongoing work. All applications will be considered by the conference organising committee/IYS executive Board. Please note that all presenters must be paid-up members of the International Yeats Society. To sign up, please use the following link:
https://internationalyeatssociety.org/members/
The deadline for proposals is November 10th. Registration will open November 1st.
