The International Society for the Study of Surrealism is delighted to invite you to an illustrated talk, ‘Touched by The Hand of Ithell: Writing Genius of the Fern Loved Gully,’ with Amy Hale.

“22 years ago, when I first learned of Ithell Colquhoun while having lunch with a friend in Cornwall, she was a little-known surrealist who had a rather obscure reputation in Britain’s occult underground. Since that time, and especially over the past five years, Colquhoun’s reputation has exploded not only as a unique force in the wider story of women’s surrealism, but also as a significant esoteric theorist, essayist and novelist. In this informal illustrated talk, I will tell the more personal story of my two decades of research and discovery into the life and work of Ithell Colquhoun that led to the 2020 biography Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor Press), and explore the convergence of cultural moments currently illuminating her work.” Amy Hale

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer, curator and critic. She has a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA and has published academic and popular articles on a wide range of topics such as Paganism and the New Right, women’s esoteric art, Cornish cultural nationalism, Arthuriana, color theory, and occult performance art. She has written widely on artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, notably the biography Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor 2020) and is currently editing a selection of Colquhoun’s esoteric essays. She is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). She has contributed gallery texts and essays for a number of institutions including Tate, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and Spike Island, Bristol. Other essays can be found at her website www.amyhale.me.

To purchase the book, visit here.

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We look forward to seeing you on Sunday 16 October, 11.30am (EST). Please check your own timezone.

The International Society for the Study of Surrealism is delighted to invite you to the virtual book launch of The World Arts of Surrealism: Networks and Perspectives from the Global South. The author, Andrea Gremels, will be in discussion with Professor Patricia Allmer (University of Edinburgh), and this will be followed by a Q&A.

Between André Breton’s call to dissolve the categories of dream and reality, and the Martinican poet Suzanne Césaire’s anti-colonial claim to “finally transcend the antinomies white-black, European-African, civilized-wild,” surrealism has experienced many anticipations, inspirations, and transformations from the Global South.

Through a selection of surrealist positions from literature, film, photography, and visual art, World Arts of Surrealism shows how authors and writers such as Antonin Artaud, Wifredo Lam, Joyce Mansour, and Octavio Paz create poetic ethnographies, syncretic cosmovisions, or anti-colonial protests by re-envisioning and transforming surrealist ideas of the marvelous, the sacred, or the uncanny.

Examining the networks of surrealism in and across Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in the first half of the 20th century Andrea Gremels argues against Eurocentric concepts of world literature and global art history. She develops an anticentric understanding of surrealist world arts that particularly takes into account postcolonial and transcultural perspectives.

Andrea Gremels is a researcher and lecturer of Francophone, Spanish, and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. She has published widely on Caribbean and Latin American literature, film, and other media, transcultural studies, postcolonial theory, and international surrealism. She is Executive Board member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, member of the advisory board of the Association Atelier André Breton, and a former Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Latin American Institute of Freie Universität Berlin.

Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh, and is an internationally leading expert on women artists and Surrealism. She has curated major exhibitions including Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism (2009) and 4 Saints in 3 Acts: A Snapshot of the American Avant-garde (2018). She regularly contributes invited essays and articles to exhibitions, books, and magazines. Her latest monograph is The Traumatic Surreal: Germanophone Women Artists and Surrealism after the Second World War (Manchester UP, 2022). https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/patricia-allmer

To order The World Arts of Surrealism: Networks and Perspectives from the Global South visit here.

For a 35 % discount, contact the author at a.gremels@em.uni-frankfurt.de

To order your free tickets, visit the Eventbrite page here.

We look forward to seeing you on Sunday October 9, 6pm (CET). Please check your own timezone.

The International Society for the Study of Surrealism is delighted to invite you to the virtual book launch of Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910-1940. Author, Effie Rentzou, will be in conversation with Kate Conley.

How did the avant-garde imagine its interconnected world? And how does this legacy affect our understanding of the global today?

The writers and artists of the French avant-garde aspired to reach a global audience that would be wholly transformed by their work. In this study, Effie Rentzou delves deep into their depictions of the interwar world as an international and modern landscape, one marked by a varied cosmopolitanism. The avant-garde’s conceptualization of the world paralleled, rejected, or expanded prevailing notions of the global sphere.

The historical avant garde—which encompassed movements like futurism, Dada, and surrealism—was self-consciously international, operating across global networks and developed with the whole world as its horizon and its public. In the heady period between the end of the Belle Époque and the tumult of World War II, both individual artists (including Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Francis Picabia, Louis Aragon, Leonora Carrington, and Nicolas Calas) and collective endeavors (such as surrealist magazines and exhibitions) grappled with contemporary anxieties about economic growth, imperialism, and colonialism, as well as various universalist, cosmopolitan, and internationalist visions. By probing these works, Concepts of the World offers an alternative narrative of globalization, one that integrates the avant-garde’s enthusiasm for, as well as resistance to, the process. Rentzou identifies within the avant-garde a powerful political language that expressed the ambivalence of living and creating in an increasingly globalized world—a language that profoundly shaped the way the world has been conceptualized and is experienced today.

Effie Rentzou is Professor of French Literature at Princeton University. Her research and teaching focus on modernism and the avant-garde, especially in their international and political dimensions, on poetics and the interaction of text and image. Her publications include Littérature malgré elle: Le surréalisme et la transformation du littéraire (2010), Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910-1940, (2022), the edited volume 1913: The Year of French Modernism (2020), and many articles and book chapters on surrealism, the avant-garde, and poetry. She is currently the president of ISSS (International Society for the Study of Surrealism).

Kate Conley is a professor of French & Francophone Studies and Chancellor Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures at William & Mary. She publishes on the surrealist movement. Her most recent book is Surrealist Ghostliness (Nebraska, 2013). Her current book project is entitled “Mapping the Surrealist Collection.”

To purchase the book, visit here.

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We look forward to seeing you on Friday September 30, 11.30am (EST). Please check your own timezone.

The International Society for the Study of Surrealism is delighted to invite you to the next ISSS book launch and discussion. Lucy Bradnock will reflect on her recent book No More Masterpieces: Modern Art After Artaud, published by Yale University Press in 2021, followed by a Q&A.

“Like Sade and Reich, Artaud is relevant and understandable, a cultural monument, so long as one mainly refers to his ideas without reading much of his work” – Susan Sontag

No More Masterpieces: Modern Art After Artaud charts the ways in which the writing of French writer and dramaturg Antonin Artaud took hold in the imaginations of American poets and writers in the post-war decades. Artaud’s interest in political and cultural disorder, the dangers of authority, and the unreliability of representation found fertile ground in the context of the Cold War, disillusionment with the ideals of Abstract Expressionism, and the early years of identity politics. Poets, artists, and performers mobilised and extended Artaud’s ideas to imagine new forms of representation, to challenge the constraints placed upon the social body, and to redefine the relationship between artist and audience.

Lucy Bradnock is Vice-Dean for Research at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Editor of the journal Art History. Previously she was Research Fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2009-2012), then Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Nottingham (2012-22). Her research examines histories of art, criticism, and curating in the post-war United States, and is situated at the intersection of visual art, poetry, and performance. In addition to her monograph, she is a co-author and co-editor of Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980 (Getty, 2011) and co-editor of the collected volume Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Getty, 2015).

To purchase the book (UK) visit here.

To purchase the book (US) visit here.

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We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday September 14, 9am (PST). Please check your own timezone.

The International Society for the Study of Surrealism is delighted to invite you to a virtual lecture and Q and A with Patricia Allmer on her new publication, ‘The Traumatic Surreal’.

‘The Traumatic Surreal’ is the first major study to examine the ground-breaking role played by Germanophone women artists working in surrealist traditions in responding to the traumatic events and legacies of the Second World War.

Analysing works in a variety of media by leading artists and writers, the book redefines the post-war trajectories of surrealism and recalibrates critical understandings of the movement’s relations to historical trauma. Chapters address artworks, writings and compositions by the Swiss Meret Oppenheim, the German Unica Zürn, the Austrian Birgit Jürgenssen, the Luxembourg-Austrian Bady Minck and the Austrian Olga Neuwirth and her collaboration with fellow Austrian Nobel-prize winning novelist Elfriede Jelinek. Locating each artist in their historical context, the book traces the development of the traumatic surreal through the wartime and post-war period.

Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh. She curated the prize-winning Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism (Manchester Art Gallery/Prestel, 2009), and subsequently co-curated and co-edited the catalogues for a range of major exhibitions including 4 Saints in 3 Acts: A Snapshot of the American Avant-garde in the 1930s (2018, MUP), and Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs (2014, Prestel), both at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

Her many books include René Magritte (Reaktion Press, 2019), Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (MUP, 2016), and the collection Intersections: Women Artists/Surrealism/Modernism (MUP, 2016). More information can be found on her webpage.

To order your free tickets, visit the Eventbrite page here.

You can purchase the book here. Get a discount of 40% with the code: MUP 40.

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday July 20, 5pm (BST). Please check your own timezone.

The International Society for the Study of Surrealism is delighted to present this virtual book launch of Duchamp’s Pipe: A Chess Romance. Author and artist Celia Rabinovitch will be in conversation with author and artist, Ann McCoy, followed by an audience Q&A.

Spanning three decades, two continents, two world wars, and the international art and chess scenes of the mid-twentieth century, Duchamp’s Pipe explores the remarkable friendship between art world enfant terrible Marcel Duchamp and blindfold chess champion, George Koltanowski. Artist and cultural historian Celia Rabinovitch describes each man’s rise to prominence, the chess matches that sparked their relationship, and the recently discovered pipe that Duchamp gave to Koltanowski. This tale of genius and resilience offers fresh insights into the meaning of the gift in the bohemian underground, revealing the exchange between the chess wizard George Koltanowski and the artist Marcel Duchamp.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Vine Award in Canadian Jewish Literature for history.

Celia Rabinovitch, PhD, MFA, artist, writer, and scholar, weaves the artist’s experience into a new understanding of modern art, poetry, history, biography, and cultural anthropology. Duchamp’s Pipe: A Chess Romance – Marcel Duchamp & George Koltanowski (North Atlantic Books: Berkeley, 2020) was nominated for a Vine Award in Canadian Jewish Literature for history, 2021, and is recognized by scholars of art, Surrealism, poetry, and cultural history. Her influential book, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art, uncovers the struggle between the sacred, occult and secular streams in modern art.

She has held positions as Program Director for Fine Arts, Music, and Graphic Design at University of California Berkeley Extension (1992-2002), where she was also a John A Sproul Research Fellow in Canadian studies, fine arts and anthropology (2013) and a visiting scholar-artist. She has been director and professor at the School of Art, University of Manitoba, Canada, and a professor in art studio at Syracuse University, and in art history at University of Colorado at Denver. She has taught at California College of the Arts, the San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University, and has been an invited speaker at Cornell University, the Israel Museum Jerusalem, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Her luminous paintings have been shown in Canada, Europe and the USA, and she has held artist residencies at Syracuse Graduate Painting Program; University of Victoria, British Columbia Centre for Studies in Religion & Society, and in 2021 at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her exhibition, The Lost Expressionist: Nick Yudell, a Photographer Discovered, is at the Manitoba Museum until August 2022. Duchamp’s Pipe is her second book.

Discover more at www.duchampspipe.com. Other works can be viewed at www.lostexpressionist.com.

Ann McCoy, MA, artist, writer, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail in New York, was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation award in 2019, for painting and sculpture. She has taught in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama (2010- 2020), and the Art History Department at Barnard College (1980 – 2000). Ann McCoy worked with Prof. C.A. Meier, Jung’s heir apparent, for twenty-five years in Zurich. She has studied alchemy since the early seventies in Zurich, and Rome at the Vatican Library, and recently offered a course on Jung, Art & the Alchemical Imagination for the Jung Archademy, Canada.

Ann McCoy’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. She has received awards from the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Berliner Kunstler Program D.A.A.D. Discover more online here.

To order your free tickets, visit the Eventbrite page here.

You can purchase the book here. Get a discount of 30% with the code: duchamp. (Duration: present-June 15. Applies to print and digital copies)

We look forward to seeing you on Thursday June 2, 3:30 – 4:30 pm (BST). Please check your own time zone.

The International Society for the Study of Surrealism is delighted to present this virtual book launch of Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood. Author David Hopkins will be in dialogue with Joyce Cheng, followed by an audience Q&A.

We all have memories of the object-world of childhood. For many of us, playthings and images from those days continue to resonate. Rereading a swathe of modern and contemporary artistic production through the lens of its engagement with childhood, this book blends in-depth art historical analysis with sustained theoretical exploration of topics such as surrealist temporality, toys, play, nostalgia, memory, and 20th-century constructions of the child. The result is an entirely new approach to the surrealist tradition via its engagement with “childish things.” Providing what the author describes as a “long history of surrealism,” this book plots a trajectory from surrealism itself to the art of the 1980s and 1990s, through to the present day. It addresses a range of figures from Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, Joseph Cornell, and Helen Levitt, at one end of the spectrum, to Louise Bourgeois, Eduardo Paolozzi, Claes Oldenburg, Susan Hiller, Martin Sharp, Helen Chadwick, Mike Kelley, and Jeff Koons, at the other.

David Hopkins is Professor Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. His many books include Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared (OUP, 1998), Dada’s Boys: Masculinity After Duchamp (Yale UP, 2007) and Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada (edited with Michael White: Northwestern UP, 2014). He is the editor of the 2016 survey of the Dada-Surrealism research field A Companion to Dada and Surrealism and of widely-read text books including After Modern Art 1945-2017 ( 2nd edition, OUP 2018) and Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction ( OUP, 2004).

Joyce S. Cheng is associate professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon (Eugene, Oregon, USA). She teaches courses in European modernism and the avant-garde from the perspectives of the visual arts, poetics, aesthetic theories, intellectual and cultural history. She has published articles and book chapters on Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism, and is currently finishing a book entitled The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject.

To order your free tickets, visit the Eventbrite page here.

You can purchase the book here.

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday March 16th, 6:30 – 7:30 PM (GMT). Please check your own timezone.

Celebrate the publication of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work by joining us for a conversation with author Abigail Susik, host Claire Howard, and guests.

In Surrealist sabotage and the War on Work, art historian Abigail Susik uncovers the expansive parameters of the international surrealist movement’s ongoing engagement with an aesthetics of sabotage between the 1920s and the 1970s, demonstrating how surrealists unceasingly sought to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work. In four case studies devoted to surrealism’s transatlantic war on work, Susik analyses how artworks and texts by Man Ray, André Breton, Simone Breton, André Thirion, Óscar Domínguez, Konrad Klapheck, and the Chicago surrealists, among others, were pivotally impacted by the intransigent surrealist concepts of principled work refusal, permanent strike, and autonomous pleasure. Underscoring surrealism’s profound relevance for readers engaged in ongoing debates about gendered labour and the wage gap, endemic over-work and exploitation, and the vicissitudes of knowledge work and the gig economy, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work reveals that surrealism’s creative work refusal retains immense relevance in our wired world.

Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University.

To order your free tickets, visit the Eventbrite page here.

We look forward to seeing you on Sunday 09 January 2022, 10.30am – 11.30am (PST). Please check your own timezone.

The International Society for the Study of Surrealism is delighted to present our first 2022 Season virtual book launch of Remade in America. Author, Joanna Pawlik, will present her work which will be followed by an audience Q&A.

It is often assumed that surrealism did not survive beyond the Second World War and that it struggled to take root in America. This book challenges both assumptions, arguing that some of the most innovative responses to surrealism in the postwar years took place not in Europe or the gallery but in the United States, where artistic and activist communities repurposed the movement for their own ends. Far from moribund, surrealism became a form of political protest implicated in broader social and cultural developments, such as the Black Arts movement, the counterculture, the New Left, and the gay liberation movement. From Ted Joans to Marie Wilson, artists mobilized surrealism’s defining interests in desire and madness, the everyday and the marginalized, to craft new identities that disrupted gender, sexual, and racial norms. Remade in America ultimately shows that what began as a challenge to church, family, and state in interwar Paris was invoked and rehabilitated to diagnose and breach inequalities in postwar America.

Joanna Pawlik is Senior Lecturer in the department of Art History at the University of Sussex.

To order your free tickets, visit the Eventbrite page here.

You can purchase a copy of the book here.

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday 19 January 2022, 7.30pm – 8.30pm (GMT). Please check your own timezone.

The International Society for the Study of Surrealism is electing a Vice President who will serve the first two years as Vice President (November 2021-November 2023), and the next two years as the President (November 2023-November 2025), as well as a Program Chair to serve for a two-year term (November 2021-November 2023).

The Vice President will be responsible for keeping track of the Annual Calendar, for scheduling quarterly meetings of the ISSS executive board, and any occasional extraordinary meetings that might be necessary, in consultation with the President, and will become leading President of the organization in November 2023.

The Program Chair will have a lead effort to identify conference locations and conference hosts for the ISSS annual conference, support conference hosts with program components and schedule, and be the liaise between host organizers and ISSS board members and report on the program committee’s activities.

The election poll will start Saturday, 13 November, at 10 am EST and will be open until two weeks after the ISSS virtual conference. You will receive an email by the elections chair (isss.elections@gmail.com) leading you to the voting poll.

Our candidates for Vice President

Felicity Gee is Senior Lecturer in Modernism and World Cinema at the University of Exeter and was the organiser of the 2nd ISSS Conference at Exeter in 2019. Her research and teaching focus on surrealism, avant-garde and global art cinema, and critical theory. She is author of the monograph Magic Realism, World Cinema and the Avant-Garde (2021). https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/english/staff/gee/

Elliott King is Associate Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA) and a founding Board member of ISSS, and has served the organization since 2016 as Acting Communications Co-Chair (2016-20), Acting Treasurer (2020-present), and member of the Programming Committee. He is author of the monograph Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema (2007). https://my.wlu.edu/directory/profile?ID=x7214

Thomas Mical is Professor of Architectural Theory of Jindal School of Art and Architecture in Delhi, India and has been a tenured Professor in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. He has taught, written, and mentored in Surrealism globally for three decades since completing my Ph.D. on Giorgio de Chirico. He is editor of the anthology Surrealism and Architecture (2005). https://jgu.edu.in/jsaa/node/58

Iveta Slavkova is Assistant Professor of Art History at the American University of Paris. She has been a member of the ISSS since its foundation and participated in the elaboration of the ISSS virtual conference as a member of the Program Committee. She has worked on the notion of anti-humanism and ab-humanism in surrealism and is author of the monograph Réparer l’homme. La crise de l’humanisme et l’Homme nouveau des avant-gardes autour de la Grande Guerre (1909-1929) (2020). https://www.aup.edu/profile/islavkova

Our candidates for Program Chair

Nadia Albaladejo is Assistant Lecturer for Spanish at the Waterford Institute of Technology. She has received her doctoral degree from University College Cork. Funded by the Irish Research Council she investigated the Spanish/Mexican surrealist artist Remedios Varo from an interdisciplinary and interartistic approach. At UCC she was named Chair of the Dyslexia Working Group as well as social media manager for the Centre of Mexican Studies. She was member of the Program Committee of the 2021 ISSS virtual conference, Surrealisms 2021. https://ie.linkedin.com/in/dr-nadia-albaladejo-garc%C3%ADa-4659368a

Raymond Spiteri is Senior Lecturer of Art History at the School of English, Film, Theatre, Media Studies, and Art History of Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). He has a longstanding commitment to the study of surrealism and a solid history of publications focusing on the tension between the cultural and political dimension of surrealism. He was on the organizing committee for the 2012 Art Association of Australia and New Zealand annual conference and has served on the organizing committee for the 2021 ISSS online conference. https://people.wgtn.ac.nz/raymond.spiteri

Anna Watz is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Linköping University (Sweden). While her home discipline is literary studies, her research is both interdisciplinary and multilingual. She investigates surrealism and the avant-garde, gender and feminist theory, contemporary women’s writing, and representations of female desire. She is the author of the monograph Angela Carter and Surrealism (2016), and editor of Surrealist Women’s Writing (2020). https://liu.se/en/employee/annwa19

2021 ISSS Elections: Candidate Statements

Candidates for Vice President

Felicity Gee (University of Exeter)

Felicity Gee is Senior Lecturer in Modernism and World Cinema at the University of Exeter and was the organiser of the 2nd ISSS Conference at Exeter in 2019. Her research and teaching focus on surrealism, avant-garde and global art cinema, and critical theory. Trained in English literary studies, her doctoral research spanned literature, art history, and film (Royal Holloway, University of London). She is author of the monograph Magic Realism, World Cinema and the Avant-Garde, which explores the art historical and critical inception of magic realism, its overlaps with surrealism, and traces its geopolitical application in cinema. She has also written on avant-garde film, Luis Buñuel, the writings of Leonora Carrington and Claude Cahun, as well as on the surrealist novel in Japan. Her current research project centres on the oeuvre of Valentine Penrose, and the role of female travels/voyages in surrealism. Ever mindful of the fast-approaching centennial year which will commemorate the publication of André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), she is also collaborating with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (co-founded by Roland Penrose) on a film and events programme to celebrate the legacy of surrealism across the year in 2024.

Surrealism is an attitude and a way of life, not just a field of research; and its potential revolutionary and revelatory politics are essential to life in the 21st Century. It is exciting to think about the many ways that ISSS in its fiercely interdisciplinary, intersectional, and international work can reach and inspire a growing number of artists and scholars. It would be an absolute privilege to play a part in sustaining and expanding this vision, particularly through fostering further collaborations between scholars and artists, between disciplines, but also continuing to support and promote those who are at an early stage in their careers.

Elliott King (Washington and Lee University)

As a founding Board member of ISSS, I have served the organization since 2016 as Acting Communications Co-Chair (2016-20), Acting Treasurer (2020-present), and for

two years as a member of the Programming Committee. In these roles, I have sought to establish our online and social media presence, expand membership, help facilitate a world-class conference, and keep the organization financially solvent. It has been a sincere joy to see ISSS grow from a small group of dedicated colleagues into an international organization with two major conferences, 255 members, and over 700 Facebook followers.

If elected Vice President, I would work ardently to keep ISSS a dynamic and inclusive space for the ongoing, multi-disciplinary study of surrealism. Part of ISSS’s mission is to ‘integrate the field of surrealism studies worldwide,’ and in addition to our large-scale conferences, I support smaller workshops and events – virtual and in-person – that build community across geographies and time-zones. I am eager to support ISSS’s journal and book series initiative. I am also keen to bolster connections ISSS has formed between scholars and surrealist practitioners; indeed, I consider the axis between academics and living surrealists to be among ISSS’s most distinguishing and admirable characteristics.

ISSS is a wonderful organization with exciting intellectual exchanges, a valuable mission, and passionate individuals devoted to surrealism. It would be my honor to help lead us as VP.

Thomas Mical (University of Delhi, India)

This proposal for the VP role in the International Society for the Study of Surrealism is motivated by the values of curiosity, diversity, multiplicity in a global imagination. Curiosity draws many to surrealism, and curiosity is imbedded in surrealist theories and practices which offer fertile avenues for exploration and liberation. ISSS should be proactively scanning and tracking established and emergent forms of artistic scholarship for demonstrating innovative questioning, cascading from diverse surrealism(s). Diversity of scholars and investigators, emergent forms of scholarship from unexpected locations and under-explored disciplines should also be core to ISSS. Multiplicity demands the pursuit of alternate narratives, alternate lives, alternate models existing just beneath the surfaces of appearance and logic – the potential of the sacred, the erotic, the uncanny, the marvelous to erupt into the everyday which ISSS can champion.

We should work to transparently welcome the maximum number of scholars, centers, and archives of surrealism dynamically. I have been a tenured Professor in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and now India. I have taught, written, and mentored in Surrealism globally for 3 decades since completing my Ph.D. on Giorgio de Chirico.

For example, my anthology “Surrealism and Architecture” (Routledge, 2005) is still in print and has influenced students, curators, and designers for decades. Today I offer my substantial international networks to help grow the breadth and depth of these values for future ISSS initiatives. My vision: the world desperately needs streaming surrealism for the everyday to become marvellous, to welcome strange beauty to emerge.

Iveta Slavkova (American University of Paris, France)

My research on Surrealism is related to my work on the avant-garde and the crisis of humanism in Europe following the First World War. Cutting across the disciplines, my PhD and publications have explored the radical redefinition of the self and subjectivity proposed by the Surrealists. Anti-humanist in the sense of a rupture with the supposedly universal preconceptions of Western civilization based on the Enlightenment, positivism, and scientific progress, the Surrealists analyzed without concession the perverse effects in the internal mechanisms of humanism that led to its failure embodied by the two world wars and genocide.

I am currently working on Parisian ‘’abhumanism’’ which, theorized by Jacques Audiberti and Camille Bryen in the 1950s, stemmed in part from the Surrealist critique of humanism. The project focuses on artists and writers who were informally engaged with Surrealism—Bryen and Audiberti— and proposes new ways to approach the work of Wols, Henri Michaux or Antonin Artaud. Together with Anne-Marie Butler and Donna Roberts, I am editing a book on “Ecology and Surrealism”, a project born from a CAA conference panel in February 2021, to be published at Vernon Press in 2023.

I have been a member of ISSS since its foundation and participated in elaboration of the ISSS virtual conference as a member of the Program committee. I am part of Paris conference organizing committee which, postponed due to the pandemics, will take place as soon as circumstances allow. Fluent in 4 languages, knowledgeable in two others, with expertise in Slavic and Eastern European languages and cultures, stimulated by engaged and multicultural colleagues in the heart of Paris, I hope to contribute to enlarging the international scope of ISSS.

Candidates for Program Chair

Nadia Albaladejo (Waterford Institute of Technology)

I achieved First-Class Honors in both a BA and MA from University College Cork. Funded by the Irish Research Council my doctoral degree investigated the Spanish/Mexican surrealist artist Remedios Varo from an interdisciplinary and interartistic approach. I have a special interest in working across multiple fields, as seen in my last publication, a reflection on space-making in Varo’s La creación de las aves, and also in my current research on surrealism and fashion and Varo’s only written manuscript, De Homo Rodans.

Throughout my doctoral studies, I have focused on a range of issues directly related to Surrealist studies always from this interdisciplinary perspective. I have taught a range of modules which have enhanced my understanding of intercultural/interartistic development, and which have developed my skills in the area of presentation, organisation and teamwork strategy. Proof of my other research interests and my multifaceted-personality, is the fact that during my time in UCC I was named Chair of the Dyslexia Working Group as well as social media manager for the Centre of Mexican Studies. I was also awarded funding to single-handedly organise two international conferences in June 2020 that would have showcased my interests for both Spanish teaching and surrealist art, however due to the current Covid 19 situation these were temporarily postponed.

I have attended an array of local and international conferences, seminars and symposia where I have delivered the findings of my research to a broad range of scholars and postgraduate students. This has provided me with a series of skills and given me a strong vision for conference programming worldwide which I believe will serve me well in the role of Conference Program Chair at the International Society for study of Surrealism

Raymond Spiteri (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)

I have a longstanding commitment to the study of surrealism, going back to by doctoral studies in the 1990s, and a solid history of publication on aspects of surrealism. The particular focus in my research is how the history of the surrealist movement is animated by a tension between the cultural and political dimension of surrealism.

I fully support the mission of the ISSS, and would bring an international perspective to the position. I have spent much of my career in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, with four years working in US universities. The ISSS conference is an

important and unique forum for the study of surrealism, and I can see it playing a key role in the development of surrealism studies. Its international focus presents opportunities and challenges to the field, particularly in understanding the transmission and dissemination of surrealism across national boundaries. Surrealism can no longer be approached from a singular perspective, but must encompass the plural character of surrealism, perhaps best captured in the central question: What is surrealism?

I also have a range of experience on conference organisation: I was on the organising committee for the 2012 Art Association of Australia and New Zealand annual conference (a major regional conference), and have frequently organised conference panels and symposia. I also served on the organising committee for the 2021 ISSS online conference.

Anna Watz (Linköping University, Sweden)

The success of the two previous ISSS conferences, in terms of establishing new connections, inspiring conversation, as well as fostering international collaboration, has undoubtedly contributed to the current prospering of surrealism studies and surrealist activities globally. I entirely support the ISSS’s inclusive understanding of surrealism as a movement that is not limited to certain geographical locations or historical periods. My own research is in line with this vision in its focus on women artists and writers working up until the present moment. I am strongly committed to the continuation of the annual conference as well as to ISSS’s international and multilingual mission. Since we are living in a moment of unprecedented environmental crisis, I believe we have a responsibility to plan future conferences as hybrid events, so as to ensure the continued in-person contact between scholars that the ISSS has enabled in the past while also providing sustainable access to these discussions.

I am Associate Professor of English at Linköping University, Sweden. While my home discipline is literary studies, my research is both interdisciplinary and multilingual. I am currently working on a book on surrealist women artists and writers and the emergence of theories of écriture féminine. I am the author of Angela Carter and Surrealism (Routledge, 2016), and editor of Surrealist Women’s Writing (Manchester UP, 2020) and A History of the Surrealist Novel (Cambridge UP, 2022).