September 30., Wednesday
Venue: University of Pannonia, Building B, Conference Center, 2nd floor

13:00 – 14:30
Room 1 – Chair: Eva Papp
European – Australian Scientific Cooperation
László Kocsis:
Grape phylloxera management in Australia and Europe
János Kristóf:
Clay-based nanocomposites for the environment: an Australian-Hungarian approach
Norbert Miskolczi:
Chemical recycling of waste plastics: production of high value products

14:30 -14:45
Coffee break (Room 3)

14:45 – 16:15
Room 2 – Chair: Helga Ramsey-Kurz
Remembering, forgetting, reconfiguring
Anne Brewster:
Violent Intimacies: Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap
Dominique Seve:
Revisiting the Myths of Australia: David Malouf, Tim Winton and Patrick White
Chen Hong:
Australian Literature in the Chinese Perspective
Andrea F. Szabó:
Ghosting Space: De Kretser’s The Lost Dog    14:45 – 16:45

Room 1 – Chair: Éva Bús
Visual representation and the politics of space
Peter Kilroy:
Dis-placing Australia: Topolitics and Torres Strait Documentary
Andrea Hübner:
Arsenal of Visual Topoi in the Interpretation of the Newly Found Land: Orientalism in the Making
Ágnes Tóth:
Mad Max along the (Post-)Apocalyptic Road
Rachel Joy:
The Topos of Being Occupier: A White Australian Art Practice
16:45 – 17:15

Coffee break (Room 3)
17:15 – 18:15
Room 1 – Chair: Éva Forintos
Plenary lecture
Eva Papp
“Topos”, space-time, Dreamtime
18: 30 – 19: 15
TBA
19:30 – 22:00
Reception
Venue: University of Pannonia, Building B, Aula


October 1., Thursday
Venue: University of Pannonia, Building B, Conference Center, 2nd floor

8:30-10:00
Room 1 – Chair: Chen Hong
Australia and the European Imagination
Ágnes Pokol-Hayhurst:
“Down Under” with Anthony Trollope and Bill Bryson: A 19th-Century and a Contemporary Portrait of Australia
Catarina Riba Segura:
Place and identity in Eugenia Tsoulis´ Between the Ceiling and the Sky (1998)
Natasa Kampmark:
The Topos of Australia and The Topoi of Serbian Migrant Writing in Australia    8:30-10:00

Room 2 – Chair: Julieanne Lamond
Place Australia
Martina Horakova:
“Topos of Journeying across Australian Outback: Re-reading Robyn Davidson’s Tracks as a Master Narrative”
Valerie-Anne Belleflamme:
Chronos and Topos: The Inheritance of the Here-Now in Gail Jones’s Five Bells
Cecilia Gall:
Is there a Charlie’s Country? Ideas of home in Rolf de Heer’s latest film
    
10:00 – 10:15
Coffee break (Room 3)

10:15 – 11:15
Room 1 – Chair: David Callahan
Plenary lecture
Anthony Gall:
Australian sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List
11:15 – 11:30
Coffee break (Room 3)
11:30 – 13:00
Room 1 – Chair: Dominique Seve
Australianness, land, and belonging
Mitchell Rolls:
Bullshit and the Bush: A Discursive Contemplation of Belonging and Identity'
Tomasz Gadzina:
Tim Winton's Australia: An Inescapable Cultural Paradigm?
Sabine Sauter:
‘Soil and Nation’: The Role of the Australian Soil Erosion Crisis of the 1930s and 1940s for the Emergence of an Eco-Nationalist Topos    11:30 – 13:00

Room 2 – Chair: Peter Kilroy
National hiStories
Jenny Hocking & Laura Donati:
Obscured But Not Obscure: How History Ignored The Remarkable Story Of Sarah Wills Howe’
Jan Lencznarowicz:
‘The Coming event!’: John Dunmore Lang’s vision of Independent Australia
Gabriella T. Espák:
Whitlam, Blanchett, Williamson: Cultural Icons of Australia

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break
Venue: Hangvilla (2 Brusznyai Árpád Street, 10 minute walk)

October 1, Thursday
Venue: VEAB (Regional Branch of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
37 Vár Street (Veszprém Castle)
14:30 – 16:30
Main Hall – Chair: Jenny Hocking
Crime, guilt, shame, and reparation in fictional representation
David Callahan:
Guilt and Shame Regret the Confusion: Retheorizing Australian Fictional Representations of East Timor
Julieanne Lamond:
Sovereign Violence and Popular Spectacle: Flogging as Australian Commonplace
Donna Coates
Captive Allies: Italian Prisoners of the Second World War in Australia
Martin Renes:
Topos and Topics in Indigenous-Australian Crime Fiction; The Case of Philip McLaren

17:00  – 19:00
A guided historical walk in Veszprém
or
18:00 – 19:00
Concert in the Bishop’s Palace, Veszprém Castle

19:30 –  22:00
Reception
Venue: St. Stephen Room, County Hall, Megyeháza Square (10 minute walk)

October 2., Friday
Venue: University of Pannonia, Building B, Conference Center, 2nd floor

8:00 – 10:00
Room 1 – Chair: Marc Delrez
Contexts, insides, outsides
Vanessa Castejon & Anna Cole:
Australian Identity from Afar: Postcolonial Australia and Europe
Jorge Lopez Lopez:
Kinky Imperialism? The Use of Transgressions as an Extolment of the English Presence in Australia in Elizabeth Jolley's The Sugar Mother
Jean Page:
“Terra Australis— Land of the inmost heart”: James McAuley’s Deconstruction  of Utopia in Captain Quiros (1964)”
Ferenc András:
Chalmers’ Demon    

Room 2 – Chair: Martin Renes
 Indigenous cultures, settler cultures and legitimate belonging
Jaroslaw Kusnir:
Identity, Aboriginal and Popular Cultures in Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance (2010)
Jana Scigulisnka:
Worlds Made of Stories
Maria Del Pilar Royo Grasa:
“Unsettling the Settlement: The Representation of Place in Gail Jones's Black Mirror (2002) and Sorry (2007)"
Ágnes Balajthy:
“In the labyrinth of invisible pathways” – The Tropes of Australia in Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines
    
10:00 – 10:15
Coffee break (Room 3)

10:15-11:15
Room 1 – Chair: Mitchell Rolls
Plenary lectures
Nathanael O’Reilly:
Australian Literature and Suburbia
11:15 – 12:15
Inez Baranay:
A Complex Fate: Identity and Australia

12:30 – 13:00
Room 1
EASA General meeting
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break
Venue: Hangvilla (2 Brusznyai Árpád Street, 10 minute walk)
14:00  –  22:00
Trip to Balatonfüred and Tihany (meeting in the UP parking lot)
Wine tasting dinner

October 3., Saturday
Venue: University of Pannonia, Building B, Conference Center, 2nd floor
9:30-11:30
Room 1 – Chair: Sándor Czeglédi
Unsettling, safeguarding, reconfiguring
Dolores Herrero:
Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman:
Marketing Asian-Australianness
Prithvi Varatharajan:
Australian or Chinese? Spatially informed identities in “Ouyang Yu” on ABC Radio National’s Poetic
Ildikó Hortobágyi:
Under or Above the Radar? Multicultural Australia on the Screen
Éva Forintos:
Parallel Processes in Australian-Hungarian Language Contact Situation

11:30 – 12:30
Pizza/Sandwich box lunch (Room 3)

Australia as Topos: The Transformation of Australian Studies

We are delighted to announce that the University of Pannonia (Veszprém, Hungary), in cooperation with Topos – Bilingual Journal of Space and Humanities, will be hosting the 13th biannual international conference of the European Association for Studies on Australia (EASA) between 30 September and 3 October 2015.
The conference will provide an ideal venue for exploring Australia as a ‘topos’ in the academy and beyond, in ways that will seek to mobilize the manifold meanings of ‘topos’ as place, common place, and commonplace. The very fact that the discipline of Australian studies has constituted itself as a discrete branch of cultural studies, aggregating itself around self-contained and space-bound ideas of the nation, begs the question of biases possibly informing much research it has produced in the past, and points to the possibility of deconstructing today some of the foundational premises underlying the correlated discourses.
We propose therefore to reconsider the perspectives and practices endorsed by scholars and students of Australia, considering:
(1) the role played by geography, the ‘lie’ and the lure of the land, or indeed of any other cultural stereotype now felt to be clearly limiting, in the construction of a sense of national identity for Australians;
(2) the genealogy of nationalist ideologies and of rhetorical apparatuses centered on the valorization of blood, land and belonging;
(3) the political implications of the preoccupation with place apparent in many discursive elaborations of a sense of identity conceived in national terms;
(4) the history and the current fate of the myth of Australia as a ‘post-colonial’ nation, as well as the possibility that a post-colonizing agenda may sometimes be subliminally encoded in attempts at collective articulations of experience inspired by any ‘unitarian’ nationalist model;
(5) the methodological consequences for the discipline of ‘Australian studies’ if it must outgrow its own conceptual boundaries and problematize the constitutive appeal to a distinctively local font of knowledge and experience;
(6) the problematic centrality accorded to questions of cultural identity, displacing as they do other possible approaches within Australian studies;
(7) any subareas of research previously eclipsed in consequence of an identified erstwhile prominence of nationalist, geographic, identity-related modes of thinking.

The Conference will be a cross-disciplinary one and we shall consider papers on topics relating to any branch of ‘Australian studies’, including History, Literature, Culture, Film Studies, Cultural
Anthropology, Media Studies, Architecture, Geography, Spatial Studies, Environment, Political Science, Indigenous Studies, Gender Studies, Linguistics, Translation Studies, Education, Sociology, Art History, Religion, Philosophy, Music — or indeed papers inscribed at any fertile crossroads between the aforementioned categories.
We envisage to group together the selected papers under the following rubrics:
(1) Interpreting the ‘topos’ of Australia (seen as place, common place, and commonplace);
(2) Problematizing mainstream immigration and integration policies;
(3) Diasporic ‘takes’ on so-called Australian identity;
(4) The exclusiveness of nationalist communities and arguments;
(5) Inherited responsibilities and the moral requirements of belonging;
(6) Transnational perspectives on Australian society and/or history;
(7) The ‘war’ on terror and the revival of nationalism;
(8) The crisis of the humanities and the future of ‘Australian studies’;
(9) Any other rubric that will suggest itself.

We are planning to publish selected papers in the peer-reviewed Topos – Bilingual Journal of Space and Humanities, as well as in EASA’s home journal JEASA, both in print and online.
Conference fee: 100€ (early bird). (This will include a welcome drink, refreshments, lunch on Thursday and Friday, and a conference dinner on Thursday.)
Discounts on the registration fee are available for graduate students in a limited number. Please enquire at: easa2015veszprem@almos.uni-pannon.hu
An optional trip to Lake Balaton (Balatonfüred and Tihany) on Friday afternoon with wine-tasting and dinner accompanied by a folk music and dance program is offered. Participation fee: 40€.
Scholars and graduate students interested in presenting a paper are invited to submit a proposal (300 words) and a short CV to: easa2015veszprem@almos.uni-pannon.hu

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 5 June 2015.
Deadline for EARLY BIRD registration fee transfer (100€): 20 July 2015.
Deadline for REGULAR registration fee transfer (120€): 20 August 2015
Payment of participation fee for the optional trip: 20 August 2015
Notification of acceptance: 20 June 2015
Please note that conference participants must be members of EASA. (Annual membership fee is 40€. Discounts are available. Please see the conference site for further details.)
For further details please visit the conference website at easa2015.uni-pannon.hu

Main organisers:
FORINTOS, Ėva
SZABÓ F., Andrea

Organising committee:
BÚS, Éva
CZEGLÉDI, Sándor
HORTOBÁGYI, Ildikó
SZENTGYÖRGYI, Szilárd