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The organisers of this conference announce two bursaries for postgraduate students, sponsored by the Society for Renaissance Studies. The bursaries are of £175 each towards conference fee and accommodation at Tintern, to support current postgraduate students giving papers at the conference. Those wishing to apply should submit paper proposals as outlined in the cfp, clearly marking them as bursary applications. The organisers will announce the winners in February 2011. Priority may be given to those proposals engaging to some degree with material from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The bursars will be expected to provide assistance at the venue during the conference. The Wye Valley: Romantic Representations, 1640-1830 6-8 July 2011, Tintern, Monmouthshire, Wales Organisers: Professor Tim Fulford, Nottingham Trent University Dr Damian Walford Davies, Aberystwyth University Keynote speakers: Professor Suzanne Matheson, University of Windsor, Canada Professor Fiona Stafford, Somerville College, Oxford The aim of this international conference - held on the banks of the Wye at Tintern, with views over to the abbey ruins - is to revisit one of Britain's paradigmatic cultural sites: the Wye Valley. From Thomas Traherne and Henry Vaughan to William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, from the Early Modern period to Romanticism, this resonant ground has been central to British poetry, art, aesthetic theory, picturesque tourism and political intervention. The borderspace from Pumlumon to Chepstow became one of the great internalised cartographies of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is time to trace the flow of Wordsworth's famous 'wanderer through the woods' anew in order to reconsider the conditioning influence this frontier-river had on the literary, artistic and cultural imagination of the age. The Wye Valley: Romantic Representations will examine a broad spectrum of negotiations with the Wye Valley during the period 1640-1830, following in the footsteps and waterwakes of the period's commentators, authors and artists. How might we 'revisit' the Wye Valley in order to defamiliarise the myriad responses to this landscape? What is the extent of the Wye Valley's 'reach' into the various cultures of the age? What are the contours of various 'cross-border' negotiations with the Wye? The conference will bring international scholars together to examine a crucial section of the Welsh and British map. The conference will take place at the heart of Tintern, a few hundred yards from the abbey and the river. Hotels and B&Bs are located within a couple of minutes' walk. Possible excursions include the Piercefield picturesque estate, the wooded hills overlooking the valley, the castle at Chepstow, the famous iron forges along the impressive Angidy Valley and of course the Abbey itself. 20-minute papers are invited in any relevant area; suggestions are given below. Please email abstracts of c. 300 words to Stephanie Churms ([log in to unmask]) by 1 January 2011. Literatures of the Wye: Traherne, Vaughan, Dyer, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Thelwall, Landor, Cottle, Southey, Davy etc. The Picturesque: Gray, Gilpin, Price, Knight etc. Picturing Wye: Turner, Sandby, Cotman, Rowlandson, Rooker etc. Borders and Borderspaces The Political Wye The Aesthetics and Politics of the Wye Tour The Gendered Wye Devolving Romanticism New Historicism Wye = Gwy: Welsh Writing Folk and Local Histories Topographies and Cartographies The Working Wye Anthropologies of the Wye Rivers, Estuaries, Tributaries