category: all

Cineforum Journal Call for Submissions

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:54:02 -0500

Cineforum is a peer reviewed bi-annual journal devoted to the theory and art of the moving image. Cineforum is published by the Department of Film and Digital Media at Dongguk University, one of the preeminent film departments in South Korea. It was first published in 1999 and is one of the oldest running Korean film and moving images journals.

Cineforum aims to be highly inclusive forum for the presentation and discussion of innovative original research. In an age where moving image industries and popular practices are increasingly integrated, Cineforum touches upon the whole range of moving image production and dissemination today. Occasional themed issues will treat specific aspects of this range; for example, the May 2011 issue was devoted to genre theory.

We welcome submissions in English, Korean or other languages, but an English abstract is required. Cineforum’ scope includes a great variety of aspects connected to the global art and industry of the moving image, ranging from history, industrial policy to aesthetic frameworks, from theatrically released feature film to experimental film and new digitally based moving image media.

While most articles stay within the range of 6,000 to 8,000 words (footnotes excluded) there is no absolute limit on the length of an article. The peer review process is designed to be rigorous while also as swift as possible, usually taking around 30 days. Deadlines are every year on April 30 and November 30, and the journal is published every 31st May and 31st December.

In addition to the print version all articles included in Cineforum will be available for download from the Cineforum website free of charge: www.cineforum.or.kr. Authors will receive one free copy of the journal issue.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Submissions must include endnotes and bibliography, and adhere to MLA style. Please send submissions in .doc or .docx format to both contact emails below. Submissions should be sent electronically to dgcineforum@gmail.com.

Please write “Submission for Cineforum” in the subject line.

[UPDATE] Journal of Dracula Studies

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:03:57 -0500

We invite manuscripts of scholarly articles (4000-6000 words) on any of the following: Bram Stoker, the novel Dracula, the historical Dracula, the vampire in folklore, fiction, film, popular culture, and related topics.
Submissions should be sent electronically (as an e-mail attachment in .doc or .rtf). Please indicate the title of your submission in the subject line of your e-mail.
Please follow the 2009 updated MLA style.
Contributors are responsible for obtaining any necessary permissions and ensuring observance of copyright.
Manuscripts will be peer-reviewed independently by at least two scholars in the field.
Copyright for published articles remains with the author.
Submissions must be received no later than May 1, 2012, in order to be considered for the 2012 issue.
Send electronic submissions to journalofdraculastudies@kutztown.edu
Contact: Dr. Curt Herr or Dr. Anne DeLong

cfp categories:
film_and_television
gender_studies_and_sexuality
journals_and_collections_of_essays
popular_culture
victorian

UPDATE: Rukeyser Special Issue, July 15, 2012

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:15:54 -0500

JNT will mark the 2013 Centenary of Muriel Rukeyser’s birth with a special issue devoted to her stunningly varied and provocative work. We invite submissions that deepen and complicate our understanding of Rukeyser’s writings; her philosophical, poetic, and political commitments; her interest in the multiple connections between science and poetry; her articulation of an extended poetics in The Life of Poetry, which has yet to receive its due as a major modernist manifesto; her passionate response to technology; her life-long commitment to experimentalism in the context of an activist poetics; her investment in “extending the document,” especially in the context of current documentary poetic practices; her role as a post-holocaust Jewish-American poet. Essays might explore lesser known of her works (among them the prose works on Willard Gibbs and Thomas Hariot, the long poem Ajanta, the musical Houdini, the fictionalized memoir Orgy) and/or engage Rukeyser’s work, reception, and legacy in the context of recent cultural and literary theories (from post-humanism, ecological, and postcolonial theory to gender and queer theory) or contemporary poetic theories and practices (documentary poetics, orality, performativity, etc.). We will also consider experimental and "poetic" essays as well as poems under the influence of Rukeyser or in dialogue with her work.
Deadline for submissions: July 15, 2012.

Inquiries:
Elisabeth Däumer (edaumer@emich.edu) and Christine Hume (chume@emich.edu)

Submissions and Deadline:
Send complete manuscripts of 20-35 pages (double-spaced, with one-inch margins), following the latest edition of the MLA style manual. Omit all references to the author to ensure blind review. JNT prefers that footnotes be kept to a minimum and that authors incorporate material into the main text wherever possible.
Please send two hardcopies (and a digital copy emailed to both co-editors) to Journal of Narrative Theory, Attn: Rukeyser Issue, Department of English, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197.

Temptation and Redemption - 12 May 2012

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:06:26 -0500

The motif of temptation and redemption can be found in almost every area of the humanities and has played a central role in a significant number of works, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to season three of Glee.

For the first annual Carolina Emerging Scholars Conference, we invite papers exploring the complex relationship between temptation and redemption in literature and culture. Abstracts of 250 words or less are due by February 24, 2012. Abstracts should include name, the title of paper, institution, and contact information. For panel proposals, please list topics and titles of papers and an explanation of how these papers fit together. Also, please provide an abstract from each proposed panel member. We welcome submissions from undergraduate and graduate students, as well as independent scholars.

Decisions will be made by March 9, 2012. Conference guidelines will be emailed to participants upon acceptance. Visit our website at usclancaster.sc.edu/cesc.

Submit abstracts electronically via email to cescon@mailbox.sc.edu.

Call for Papers, "Digital Revolutions: Interpreting and Historicizing American Culture" (deadline 4/15; conference 10/12-13)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:55:10 -0500

Call for Papers
New England American Studies Association 2012 Conference
Providence, Rhode Island
October 12–13, 2012

Digital Revolutions: Interpreting and Historicizing American Culture

Recent developments in digital technologies have transformed the place of the humanities in American life. From online versions of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana to a daily John Quincy Adams Twitter feed to the Smithsonian’s publicly accessible Archives of American Art to the Women Writers Online Project, digital technologists are reshaping our sense of history, place, community, and identity. Digitization of America’s cultural heritage has also fundamentally transformed work in the humanities itself. From universities to libraries to cultural institutions, the information infrastructure has brought forth digital collaborations across disciplines and beyond the academy, as well as between scholars, educators, archivists and programmers. But it has also brought forward concerns about copyright, control and access to information and the future of print media.

Are such changes unprecedented? Prior evolutions in communications technology suggest otherwise. From broadsides to blogs, such changes have reshaped the way Americans interact and understand themselves both in the present and the past. The 2012 NEASA conference, Digital Revolutions, invites participants to consider what these developments are, how they are redefining work in the humanities and what previous media revolutions suggest for the future.

This conference will combine scholarly investigation of the cultural, political and economic significance of communications media with a series of panels, workshops and participatory forums that can take advantage of technologies now available to us. In addition to individual paper proposals, we also welcome submissions for roundtable discussions, hands-on workshops and multimedia sessions such as film screenings, online presentations and 5-minute lightning shorts.

Proposals should include a one page abstract and title, as well as the author’s name, address (including email), and institutional or professional affiliation. For panel proposals please include contact information for all participants, as well as a brief (no more than two page) description of the session topic and format. Submit proposals by April 15, 2012 to neasaconference12@gmail.com. Proposals or queries may also be sent to:

Sara Sikes, NEASA President
Massachusetts Historical Society, The Adams Papers
1154 Boylston Street
Boston, MA02215
ssikes@masshist.org

Tragedy/The Tragic in Asian American Literature

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:05:07 -0500

This panel will explore Asian American literary participation in the tragic mode. Reasons for this exploration include:
- the desire to explore some of the aesthetic dimensions of Asian American fiction that have long been neglected by critics.
- the desire to recuperate tragedy/the tragic for the 20th Century, where it has often been dismissed as no longer applicable
- the desire to break down longstanding binaries between existential and political approaches to the tragic.
- the desire to better understand possible political ramifications of tragedy/the tragic in the 20th Century
- the desire to examine the role of genre in knowledge production and ethics

Possible paper topics include, but not are limited to:
- any approaches/treatments of/responses to suffering in Asian American literature, by authors, readers, critics, narrators, or fictional characters
- a questioning of traditional Western claims to tragedy, through investigations of tragedy in Asian and/or Asian American literature
- Examinations of heroism in Asian American literature
- Explorations of the ways in which the tragic appears in Asian American literature
-The tragic as it manifests in Asian cultural values/belief systems.
- Ethics and suffering/grief/tragedy in Asian American literature
- Genre shaping in Asian American literature
- Attention to lyricism and imagism in Asian American fiction
- Negotiating hope in Asian American fiction
- The role of genre in knowledge production and ethics
- The tragic as it manifests in the 20th Century
- The tragic as it manifests in American literature
- The relationship of any of the above to transnationalism

Please send a 400 word abstract by email to sgardam@gmail.com by February 18, 2012.

Race and Metaphor in 19th/20th Century American Literature and Thought (MLA Boston; abstracts due March 10, 2012)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:18:32 -0500

Race and Metaphor in 19th/20th Century American Literature and Thought
MLA Special Session
January 3-6, 2013, Boston, MA
Abstract Deadline: March 10, 2012

This session takes up connections between metaphor and race, examining the ways that language and cognition influence the interactions between different racial and cultural groups. In doing so, it looks to extend awareness of the interactions between daily language and other discursive systems or practices—literary, social, political, scientific, and/or economic linguistic paradigms, for example—that inform and influence the discussion of race in daily language. In highlighting the relations between different discursive practices, the goal is to understand the ways in which language in general, and metaphor in specific, both conditions and perpetuates the relationships between different groups of people in an unequal manner. Further, unpacking the connections between language and identity will allow us to extend the ways in which Critical Race Theory can be utilized to examine the linguistic configurations that disguise the social forces perpetuating inequality. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), for instance, Toni Morrison engages the tensions created by race and metaphor:

Race has become metaphorical—a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological “race” ever was. [...] It seems that it has a utility far beyond economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before. (63)

Morrison is not alone in noting the relationship between race and metaphor; Ralph Ellison’s examination of white insecurity in “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (1970) highlights the historic validation whites found in subordinating blacks:

Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the “outsider.” (110-1)

In both Morrison and Ellison, the connection between race and metaphor becomes the means to demarcate the boundaries of inclusion and citizenship; the “utility” that Morrison connects to the metaphorical use of race refers to the implied assumptions within language that participate in maintaining the dominant ideology. In Ellison’s case, the observation that African Americans exist as a “metaphor for the ‘outsider’” points to the linguistic accrual of social and political power in language that occurs over time, specifically as this usage moves from a conscious to unconscious application.

This panel is interested in investigating the manifestation of these ideas in 19th and 20th century American literature and thought. It is open to papers focusing on the function of metaphor and race in individual works (poetry, prose, drama, film, etc.), papers addressing theoretical connections between race and metaphor, as well as papers that engage both simultaneously. How, for example, do individual authors dismantle racial metaphors in their work, or unconsciously (or consciously) make use of racial metaphors to structure ideas across individual or collective works? Are there different strategies employed by different groups of authors in addressing the negative ways in which racial metaphors silently supplement texts as well as the larger national discourse surrounding race? Similarly, how can George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s ideas concerning the mapping of the source and the target of conceptual metaphors be applied to the metaphorical performance and production of race?

Elizabeth Young, author of Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor and the Carl M. and Elsie A. Small Professor of English at Mt. Holyoke College, will be the respondent for the panel.

Please send 250-500 word abstracts by March 10, 2012 to Thomas Morgan (tmorgan2@udayton.edu).

2012 PAMLA Special Session - Creative Writing: Fictional Boundaries

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:01:43 -0500

Creative texts are sought for an approved 2012 PAMLA Special Session - Creative Writing: Fictional Boundaries.

The 2012 PAMLA conference will take place at Seattle University, Washington from October 19-21, 2012.

Creative Writing: Fictional Boundaries.
This special session will feature readings from works that challenge traditional divisions between fiction and other media or between fiction and other forms (such as poetry or non-fiction.) Writers may present recently published works or works that are still in progress.

Submission Deadline: Saturday March 31, 2012.
Please submit your proposal online at http://www.pamla.org.

Other Islands: Shaw, Beckett, and World Literature (MLA 2013)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:49:55 -0500

.
Despite their considerable differences, Bernard Shaw and Samuel
Beckett were born into an Anglo-Irish axis but envisioned worlds
beyond it that incorporated and transfigured their national heritage. This panel seeks papers that address how Shaw and Beckett might be read together, particularly through new definitions of world literature. How do Shaw and Beckett envision modern drama as a series of parables or demonstrations of world creation and destruction; as a negotiation between the local and the global; or as the erasure of historical geographies in favor of flexible places (landscapes, theatres) and spaces (the past, the future, the state)? Papers might also address Shaw and Beckett’s shared Protestantism and Neo-Protestantism, their universalism or rejection of universals, their insistence on science fiction and fantasy as ramifications of realism, and their dramatization of engagements with and retreats from inner and outer worlds, among other related topics.

Please send a 300 word-abstract and CV to Lawrence Switzky at
lawrence.switzky@utoronto.ca by March 10, 2012. Proposals and queries are welcome before the deadline.

Southerners in Film SAMLA 2012 CONFERENCE (11-9 through 11-11-12)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:29:52 -0500

This regular session of the 2012 South Atlantic Modern Language Association invites papers on any aspect of southerners as represented in contemporary film, including essays that address the transnational turn in southern film, as well as issues of authenticity, mythology, and folklore in southern film. Other topics might include (but are not limited to) the southern documentary impulse, expressions of race, class and sexuality in contemporary southern film, adaptation and re-imaginings of southern literature, and new southern studies and southern cinema. We particularly welcome submissions speaking to the conference theme of borders, migration, boundaries, and memoir. By May 15, 2012, please submit abstracts along with a short CV by e-mail to Dr. James A. Crank at cranka@nsula.edu.

CFP - Fashioning the City: Exploring Fashion Cultures, Structures, and Systems

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:07:06 -0500

CFP - Call for Papers

FASHIONING THE CITY:
Exploring Fashion Cultures, Structures, and Systems

An International Inter-disciplinary Conference

Dates and Duration: 19th-21st September 2012
Location and Venue: Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2EU. United Kingdom.
Principal Language of Conference Proceedings: English

Antwerp, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Dakar, Seoul, Sydney...a familiar, yet unfamiliar, line up of cities which have all emerged as sites for the production and display of fashion in recent times. Are these also the names set to usurp the power of the ‘’Big Five’’ ‘’Fashion Capitals’’ Paris, London, Milan, New York, and Tokyo? While the power, position and prestige of the legendary Fashion Capitals are recognised as such throughout the structures and networks of the fashion industry, none are sacrosanct as such. Post-World War Two Paris had to re-assert its hold on womenswear against threats from the sportswear culture of New York which emerged during the 1940s and early 1950s, and from London’s ‘’youth-quake’’ fashions in the 1960s. In Italy, both Rome and Florence were precursors to Milan’s authority as the country’s pre-eminent Fashion City. Yet, throughout the 20th Century, and in particular from the 1980s onwards, smaller cities, or ‘’Style Centres’’ such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, Barcelona or Copenhagen, have sought to develop their own influence through fashion culture. In Volume 15, Issue 2 of Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture published in June 2011, the editors Lise Skov, of Copenhagen Business School, and Marie Riegels Melchior, of Designmuseum Danmark, brought together a collection of research papers which pioneer an approach looking at the decentering of Fashion Cities and the fashion culture that emanates from them. In her own paper in this volume Skov considers the changes occurring towards what she describes as a ‘’poly-centric’’ fashion industry. The purpose of this conference is to bring together a variety of fashion and creative industry practitioners, researchers and commentators to

(re)consider the developing structures and networks of the fashion industry as it is set to develop in the 21st Century through such a ‘’poly-centric’’ system of Fashion Cities. Papers of 15-20 minutes duration for presentation and discussion are sought on the five core conference themes as follows:

• Developing the Fashion City
• The Role of the Fashion Academy or School
• Fashion Culture on Display
• The Business of Fashion Culture
• Disseminating Fashion Culture

Within these core themes issues for discussion and possible subjects for papers (or groups of papers) may include:

• Developing the Fashion City
• Developing fashion culture
• Relationships between Fashion Capitals and alternative sites or cities of fashion
• Developing fashion culture outside the ‘’Big Five’’ Fashion Capitals
• The role of the fashion academy or school and professional training opportunities
• Dissemination of fashion culture and the Fashion City through the media, film and television
• Dissemination of fashion culture through display in museums, galleries and retail formats
• The structure and/or restructuring of the fashion industry in the 21st Century
• The role of Fashion Weeks and fashion trade fairs in developing fashion culture
• The role of technology and new developments in technology e.g. new sales strategies, augmented reality, Fashion Film, social networking
• The role of government and city councils at regional, national and international levels
• Fashion and tourism
• Commercial versus conceptual fashion cultures
• British, European and International Perspectives

The conference is to be accompanied by an exhibition placing into context the development of the Fashion City, evolving fashion cultures and the rise of the ‘’Style Centre.’’ The focus of this exhibition will concentrate on the experience of two Style Centres: Antwerp and Copenhagen. Papers are therefore particularly welcomed which pertain to the fashion cultures of Belgium, the Netherlands or Luxembourg, Denmark and the Nordic countries (Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). Applicants with direct experience or with active research interests in developing creative city milieus, and which have a strong relevance to the fashion industry, are also warmly welcomed.

Abstracts of 300 words in English for presentations of 15-20 minutes duration should be submitted via E-mail by Friday April 6th 2012. Applicants should also include their name, job title, academic affiliation or company/organisation (as appropriate), together with full contact details including E-mail address. Facilities for presenting visual information, including PowerPoint slides and short films, will be made available to all speakers.

All Abstract submissions, together with any further questions, should be addressed to conference convenor Nathaniel Dafydd Beard at: nathaniel.beard[at]network.rca.ac.uk

Please Note: in order to promote as wide an access as possible and to facilitate continued and further debate it is intended that the proceedings of the conference are to be filmed with the permission of all participating speakers. In addition, all papers from the conference will be selected and considered for inclusion in a book-format publication(s) by a UK-based publisher.

All successful applicants will be notified by early May 2012.

No bursaries are available for travel or accommodation costs.

For further information and up-dates please refer to the conference and exhibition website:

www.fashioningthecity.wordpess.com

Supported by:

Royal College of Art

ALCS - Association of Low Countries Studies

[UPDATE] Under Western Eyes: East Asia in Anglophone Fiction

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:53:18 -0500

Under Western Eyes: East Asia in Anglophone Fiction (Special Session proposal for MLA 2013 Boston, MA)
Increasingly important to the world economy as an engine of growth, the dynamic region of East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Korea) has for decades figured prominently in world media for its critical geopolitical position. But how has East Asia’s emergence onto the world stage been reflected in late 20th-century English-language literature? This panel invites papers on recent Anglophone fiction set in East Asia; please send abstract of 1-2 pp along with a current c.v. to Mary Goodwin (profgood@hotmail.com) by 15 March 2012.

Call for panellists: Domesticating ‘India’ in 17th-Century England (deadline: 29 February 2012)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:47:16 -0500

Panel proposal for "Renaissance Old Worlds: English Encounters from the Levant to the Far East", The British Library, 29 June-1 July 2012.

Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers for the following panel:

Spices, consumption, and the aesthetics of sense: domesticating ‘India’ in 17th Century England.

In the first two decades of its existence, the staple import of the English East India Company was pepper, supplemented with other spices such as cloves. Foods and flavourings thus form an important point of contact between cultures of trade, identity and consumption. They are a commodity which is part of a literal exchange between cultures, but one which also symbolically becomes part of the way ‘India’ is represented within colonial discourse.

This panel will seek to interrogate the importance of the spice trade for 17th-century English responses to and constructions of India, and, more broadly, the material cultures of food and consumption as a way of domesticating the ‘foreign’.

Jonathan Gil Harris has suggested that English encounters with foreignness in the period are both pathologised and become a new kind of pathology, whereby anxieties about invasion and contagion challenge pre-existing epistemologies of the body and aetiology, as well as of the nature of trade and commerce. This panel seeks to interrogate this formulation, and to explore ways in which the trade in foodstuffs might complicate or extend it. In particular, the panel will explore the possibility of de-pathologising English encounters with the foreign through the domestic incorporation of tastes and textures within consumption.

This panel will ask whether spices become representative of contact between discrete national identities, or whether they can also represent possibilities of mixture and hybridity. Further, it will explore the extent to which such constructions and possibilities are welcomed or resisted. Concentrating on the representation of spice and the senses will illuminate the extent to which they might constitute new ways of thinking about old worlds, as well as exploring the importance metaphors of sensory experience have in structures of knowledge and cross-cultural encounters.

Short proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of this topic should be emailed to Susan Anderson (s.anderson@leedstrinity.ac.uk) by 29 February 2012.

For further information about the conference, see the full cfp at http://earlymodern-lit.blogspot.com/2012/01/renaissance-old-worlds.html or the conference website at http://www.liv.ac.uk/row/.

FINAL CALL [deadline 10 Feb 2012]: Panel on 'Maurice' (Forster, 1971/Ivory, 1987), AAS, York, UK, 27-28 Sep 2012

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:03:35 -0500

FINAL CALL for Panel Participants (deadline FRIDAY 10 FEBRUARY)
E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1913/1971) & 25 years of James Ivory’s Maurice (1987): adaptation(s), authorship(s) and reappraisal(s)

7th Annual Conference of the Association of Adaptation Studies
‘Visible and Invisible Authorships’
27–28 September 2012, University of York, UK

September 2012 is the 25th anniversary of the 1987 Venice Film Festival premiere and US cinema release of Merchant Ivory Productions’ adaptation of E. M. Forster’s posthumously published gay bildungsroman and love story Maurice. (At Venice, the film won the Silver Lion for Ivory as director, a double Best Actor award for its unknown leads James Wilby and Hugh Grant, and the non-annual Golden Osella for Richard Robbins’ emotive orchestral score.)

To mark this anniversary – and to invite reappraisal of the film, novel, and their ‘ongoing lives’ in relation to this year’s AAS conference themes – I would like to constitute a panel on Maurice. If you would like to join me and contribute to this, please send proposals to cmonk@dmu.ac.uk – copied to film-and-literature@events.york.ac.uk – in time for the 10 February 2012 extended abstract deadline. Please send abstracts (within the body of your email) of not more than 250 words and include a biog-sketch of not more than 100 words.

During their ‘ongoing lives’, both Forster’s novel and Ivory’s film have suffered forms of reception that marginalise them as cultural objects worthy of analysis, from the initial 1970s reception of Forster’s Maurice as an ‘inferior’ work or a ‘fairytale’ to the dismissal of Ivory’s Maurice as merely a ‘heritage film’ – epitomised in Finch and Kwietniowski’s declaration that ‘Maurice [is] … fourthly, and only fourthly, about le vice anglais’ (1988:72). Such dismissals have, however, been outweighed over time by the profound, much-testified impact of the film and book alike on readers/audiences, and understandings of both have proved to be far from fixed: whether due to reappraisal of Maurice as the ‘first modern gay novel’ or as a ‘reader, I married him’ text of pivotal significance for pro-LGBT-marriage campaigners (Curr, 2001; DeSimone, 2007); or the belated apprehension of Merchant and Ivory as ‘gay filmmakers’ (Waugh, 2000:190); or as evidenced in the constantly surprising forms of post-2000 Web 2.0 fan productivity, (re-)adaptation and appreciation around their film (Monk, 2011).

Last, neither Forster’s novel nor Ivory’s film are stable or definitive ‘authored’ texts, if we consider factors such as the pre-published novel’s privately-circulated ‘invisible’ life over almost 60 years, and Forster’s revisions during that time (most drastically, of Part 4, in response to the comments of Lytton Strachey, Christopher Isherwood and others); or the impact and implications of the 2004 DVD special-edition release of Ivory’s film – with its 40-plus minutes of omitted scenes – in fostering and making visible fans’ intense and highly personal investments in the film (including calls for a three-hour-plus director’s cut).

The questions of ‘adaptation’ and ‘authorship’ raised by Maurice therefore extend, potentially, from the 1913–1971 ‘invisible’ history of the pre-published novel to the ongoing 21st-century lives of both film and book – including further instances of the adaptation of both across various media, or hitherto under-explored approaches to the film.

References
Curr, M. (2001) ‘Recuperating E. M. Forster’s Maurice’, Modern Language Quarterly, 62:1, 53–69.
Finch, M. and Kwietniowski, R. (1988) ‘Melodrama and Maurice: homo is where the het is’, Screen, 29:3, 72–80.
Gorton, D. (2009) ‘Maurice and gay liberation’, Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, 16:6. At: www.glreview.com/article.php?articleid=173
Monk, C. (2011) ‘Heritage Film Audiences 2.0: period film audiences and online film cultures’, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 8:3, 2011. At: www.participations.org/Volume%208/Issue%202/3h%20Monk.pdf
Waugh, T. (2000) The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke UP.

Dr Claire Monk
Reader in Film & Film Culture
School of Media & Communication
De Montfort University
Leicester LE1 9BH

e-mail: cmonk@dmu.ac.uk
http://dmu.academia.edu/ClaireMonk

Call for Application - UCSIA Summer School "Culture, Religion and Society" (26 August - 2 September 2012, Antwerp, Belgium)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:02:28 -0500

Call for applications
2012 UCSIA summer school on “Religion, Culture and Society”
Sunday 26 August - Sunday 2 September (dates of arrival and departure)
Antwerp, Belgium

This year the programme will focus on the topic of Secularism(s) and Religion in Society.

It is evident that religion, culture and society are strongly interwoven and are crucial for understanding the contemporary world. With globalization touching all aspects of our lives, religion(s) and culture(s) have to understand their position in this complex globalizing process. It is the aim of the interdisciplinary UCSIA summer school to better understand the dynamic interplay between the macro- and micro-social developments concerning religion that take place in much of the contemporary world.

Guest lecturers:

Rajeev Bhargava (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi), Peggy Levitt (Wellesley College), Robert W. Hefner (Boston University) and John Hutchinson (London School of Economics).

Practical details:

Participation and stay for young scholars and researchers are free of charge. Participants should pay for their own travel expenses to Antwerp.
You can submit your application via the electronic submission on the our website: http://www.ucsia.org/summerschool
Deadline for application is Sunday 15 April 2012.

For further information regarding the programme and application procedure, please have a look at our website:.

Contact:

Sara Mels
Project coordinator

UCSIA vzw
Prinsstraat 14
B-2000 Antwerp
Belgium
Tel. +32 (0)3 265 45 99
Fax +32 (0)3 707 09 31
e-mail: sara.mels@ua.ac.be

GLOBALISING THE LOCAL, LOCALISING THE GLOBAL: GLOBALISATION, THE MEDIA AND POPULAR CULTURE IN AFRICA, 23-25 AUGUST, 2012

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:31:30 -0500

Conference Call for Papers/Proposals
As a phenomenon critical to the construction of modernity/postmodernity, globalisation with its (il)logics has precipitated debates which have continued to constitute a contested and contestable site in cultural discourses. One major discursive formation seeks to present globalisation as a programme meant to democratise the world’s cultural space for marginal cultures to survive and thrive without undue threats from dominant others. In radical contradistinction, an alternative perspective imagines globalization as an imperialist strategy to re-colonise former dominated cultures and their economies through the subtle strategy of exclusion through inclusion. The latter argument resonates strongly in peripheral societies like Africa where cultural production modes and their circulation processes have been severely mediated by globalisation. This argument seems compelling because in its latest consumerist phase, globalisation has conquered all cultural spaces of the world without leaving any oppositional strongholds.
This conference seeks to appraise the place and impact of globalisation on African media practice(s) and popular culture and how these have also participated in globalisation as a dialectical process for the construction of identity and re-invention of nationhood in Africa. In particular, the conference is interested in ways in which globalisation has engaged African media and popular culture as mediated processes through new media technologies and how they have in turn engaged globalisation. But the conference is also concerned with problematising the issues involved in the discourse on globalisation and its antinomies in relation to African media and popular culture? For instance, is globalisation an innocent, neutral phenomenon? Has globalisation fostered the dialogue or clash of civilisations and cultures? Is it necessary for the enrichment of African media and popular culture? What has Africa brought to the marketplace of ideas and culture which is globalisation? How best can globalisation be mined by the media and popular cultural expressions on the continent? Indeed, is there one Africa or one unitary African culture or a multiplicity of Africas and cultures? This complex of issues will constitute the fulcrum of discussions during the conference.
The conference organizers, therefore, invite paper abstracts and panel proposals from academics, globalization scholars, media practitioners, culture experts, activists and others around the theme of the conference with the following sub-themes:
• Theoretical issues in globalization, media and popular culture
• African media/culture policies and globalisation
• Globalization and new media technologies in Africa
• Globalization and the politics of media representations
• African popular culture in a glocalised order
• Mediascapes and the discourse on globalization
• Globalization and (en)gendered spaces in African media /culture
• African languages/literatures and globalization
• Globalization and African musical expressions
• Globalization and the politics of sports in Africa
• Globalization and African filmic/cinematic traditions
• African oral/written traditions and globalization
• Globalization and the debate on cultural decolonization
• Globalization and the knowledge economy in Africa
• The self/other dialectic in entertainment media and popular culture
• Globalization, the media and new religious experiences in Africa
• Race/cultural identity in a glocalised milieu
• The circulation of media/culture between Africa and its Diasporas
• Pan-Africanism and the politics of media(ted) culture
• Globalization and the future of African media/popular culture
Contributors should send in a 250-300 word abstract or panel proposal with their biographical details: full name, institutional affiliation, e-mail and telephone numbers on or before 25 April, 2012. The subject of the mail should be Media and Culture Conference 2012 and be addressed to: Vivian Adeoti - vadeoti@smc.edu.ng, and Tope Akintola - takintola@smc.edu.ng
Convenors:
Prof. Emevwo Biakolo
Dr. James Tar Tsaaior

Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:14:28 -0500

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed (from 2012) online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

The sixth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Greta Depledge (Royal Holloway), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century constructions and understandings of sex, courtship and marriage. Although the heteronormative and companionate marriage was vital for economic and reproductive reasons - as well as romantic impulses - recent scholarship has illuminated its status as but one of several diverse paradigms of marriage/sexual relationship accessible to the Victorians
Across the nineteenth century, profound crises of faith, extensive legal reforms and the new insights afforded by the emergent discipline of anthropology all contributed to a culture of introspection about the practice of marriage, at the same time as advances in science and medicine opened up new interpretations and definitions of sexual practices and preferences.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words, on any aspect of the theme. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:

• Victorian narratives of queer desire: text and subtext
• Representations of women’s sexuality (angels, whores and spinsters)
• Prudishness and censorship: “deviant” novels and scandalous dramas
• Adultery, bigamy, divorce and other affronts to the ideal of companionate marriage
• Transgressive relationships
• Nineteenth-century marriage law, including prohibited degrees of affinity, property reform and breach of promise
• Representations of sexual innocence and experience (virginity, puberty and prostitution
• Subversion of traditional courtship narratives
• Sex and class: adventuresses, mistresses, sex workers and blackmail
• Customs of the country: courtship conventions, betrothals and bridal nights
• Performance, stylization and parody: gender scripts, consumer culture, theatrical subversion

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions is 30 May 2012.

Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com
Website: http://www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn

2012 The Third Conference on Horticulture Science and Technology

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:00:07 -0500

In order to further improve the academic and theoretical foundations of horticulture, to enhance the production technology standard of horticulture, to foster the applications of information technology, biotechnology, electronics and other high technologies in the research and development of horticulture, to realize the rapid, stable and sustainable development of horticulture, Chinese Society for Horticultural Science intends to hold the “The Third Conference on Horticulture Science and Technology” on November 24-25，2012. Experts and researchers engaged in horticulture and related areas are sincerely invited to actively probe into the latest theoretical technology and practical applications in the area of horticulture so as to promote the horticultural development towards the goals of science and technology, industrialization and Informatization. All experts and engineering technicians are welcomed to actively contribute to and register for the conference.

Sponsor: Chinese Society for Horticultural Science
Co-sponsor: China Agricultural University
Vegetable Research Center of Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences
Beijing University of Agriculture
Beijing Forestry University

(All submissions should include, but are not limited to the followings)
1. Fruiter, Vegetable, Watermelon and Melon, and Ornamental Plant
(Germplasm resources and innovation, genetic breeding, biotechnology, stress physiology and molecular biology, cultivation technique and physiology, postharvest technology and physiology, plant protection and etc.)
2. Protected Horticulture Engineering
(Industrialized grafting and breeding technique; efficient cultivation technique; soilless cultivation; water-saving irrigation; airfertilizer technique; efficient safety production technology; environmental regulation technique; green house; new materials and techniques of horticultural facilities.)
3. Gardens
(Landscape architecture plants; landscape ecology; planning and design of Landscape architecture; computer aided design of gardens.)
4. Tea science
(Tea biochemistry; tea biotechnology; germplasm resources of tea plants; non-pollution cultivation technology of tea; genetic breeding of tea plants; pest control of tea plant; tea mechanization, cleansing and continuous processing; tea manufacture; tea culture; tea quality safety. )

Submission Deadline: Aug. 14, 2012
Notification of Acceptance: Sep. 6, 2012
Registration Deadline: Sep.18, 2012
Conference date: Nov. 24-25, 2012

Tel.: +86-010-81792490
Contact: Mr. Wu
E-mail: yuanyixh@126.com
Website: www.chst-conference.org

Modernism and Cosmopolitanism (MSA 14; Oct. 18–21, 2012)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:42:38 -0500

The past few years have witnessed a revival of interest in cosmopolitanism as scholars in a variety of disciplines seek new ways to define community in an increasingly interdependent world. Cosmopolitanism once represented an ethical and political ideal that championed a commitment to humankind as a whole and devalued local attachments. Now “new” or “counter” cosmopolitanisms have emerged; challenging the implications of traditional cosmopolitanism (ethnocentrism, imperialism, elitism), this new generation locates cosmopolitanism within the realities of a globally integrated world that recognizes and values local attachments.

A handful of studies have already applied this new cosmopolitanism to modernism and, in so doing, have reconceived the spatial and temporal boundaries of modernism. This panel seeks submissions that extend or contest previous studies as well as submissions that explore the heretofore unexamined convergences between new cosmopolitanism theory and modernist practices.

Some potential questions include (but are by no means limited to) the following:

• Can cosmopolitan “style” be located beyond the English novel?
• Does cosmopolitanism, as manifested in ways of reading and writing as well as in modes of being, represent anticolonial critique or neocolonial practice?
• Do modernist artists anticipate contemporary forms of transnational belonging?
• How do they negotiate the inherent contradictions of new cosmopolitanisms, be it “rooted,” “discrepant,” or “vernacular” cosmopolitanism?
• How much does a cosmopolitanism outlook depend on travel, migration, exile, and displacement?
• How do works of modernism represent the interplay between forces of nationalism and cosmopolitan visions?
• In what ways do modernist texts articulate cosmopolitan memory and what are the implications of cosmopolitan memory on conceptions of culture and identity?

If interested, please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to Michael Spiegel (spiegel@virginia.edu) by March 19.

Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook": Fifty Years On (MLA 2013, 3-6 Jan, Boston)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:35:44 -0500

The Doris Lessing Society invites submissions for its annual panel at the MLA Convention in Boston, 3-6 January, 2013.

2012 marks the 50th anniversary of arguably Lessing's most famous novel, "The Golden Notebook." We are seeking papers exploring "The Golden Notebook" fifty years after its publication in 1962.

Please submit 300-500 word abstracts to Alice Ridout, Doris Lessing Society President by March 15, 2012. (DorisLessingSociety@gmail.com)

A book publication is also being planned on this topic so please get in touch if you are interested in working on this topic even if you are unable to attend the MLA Convention.

Portals Literary Journal is accepting submissions for our Spring 2012 issue.

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:29:21 -0500

2012 Call for Submissions
Portals is currently accepting submissions for our Spring 2012 issue.

Submission deadline: March 1, 2012.

Portals invites original critical essays and short creative fiction that explore comparative literary topics across cultural, regional, linguistic, and temporal boundaries for the Spring 2012 issue. This edition will be available in scholarly journal listings worldwide.

Formal requirements for original critical essays:

Papers should be in English.
In order to be considered for submission, essays must compare at least two texts from different linguistic traditions.
Citations should include both the original language and the English translation.
Papers should be no longer than 25 pages in 12 point font, and should be properly formatted and documented in MLA style.
Formal requirements for creative fiction:

An author may submit up to 3 pieces of any form of creative fiction with a limit of 10 pages per submission. Fiction must be of a comparative/critical nature.
General requirements:

All submissions are to be sent via e-mail as an MS-Word attachment.
Submissions must include a 250-word abstract and a cover sheet including name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, school affiliation, and current academic standing. Your name should not appear anywhere else in the proposal, since this will be a blind selection process.
Authors should be currently enrolled undergraduate students, graduate students or doctoral candidates.
Submissions must be original and previously unpublished.
To submit, send your submission as a .doc or .rtf attachment to: clsa[at]mail.sfsu.edu

Review Process:

Portals is published once a year in the Spring semester at San Francisco State University, in conjunction with the Comparative Literature Student Association (CLSA). All articles are reviewed in a double-blind process, and authors will be notified by email within 2 to 3 months of the submission deadline.

We encourage authors to read our journal thoroughly before submitting. Portals most recent issue and archives can be found here: http://portalsjournal.com

All inquiries and questions can be directed to our editors at: clsa[at]mail.sfsu.edu

CFP MLA 2013 'Peterloo' Revisited (3/1/12)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:26:15 -0500

Special Session: Re-examinations of the historical, political, literary significance of the 1819 Manchester massacre. Papers on Shelley’s 1819 poetry are also welcome. 250-500 word abstracts. Proposals due by 1 March 2012; Michael Demson (mtd007@shsu.edu).

Modern Family (MSA 14. Las Vegas. 18-21 Oct. 2012)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:25:18 -0500

The family—as a social institution, as field of study, as a body of representation and readership—has been underserved by theories of modernism. This oversight may stem from a perception that many of the moderns, such as the Greenwich Village avant-garde, were often averse to an institution they found inherently bourgeois and conservative. This panel invites papers that will consider the family as a center of modernist thought, aesthetics, and praxis.

How might family relate to the conference theme “spectacle,” a suggestion of that which prompts “curiosity or contempt” and even “marvel or admiration”? Can the family figure anything more than the negation of modernist conventions? How might the moderns radicalize family in keeping with their other impulses toward innovation and scandal? The panel welcomes projects dealing with any national literature or theoretical orientation, and encourages submissions to consider family as a broad term encompassing multivalent modes of organization.

Send a 250-word abstract and 1-page CV (as one email attachment) to wesley.beal@lyon.edu by Monday, March 19. More details about the 2012 meeting of the MSA are available here: http://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa14/index.html.

Wunderkino 2-- On The Varieties of Cinematic Experience; abstracts 4/11/2012; symposium 7/26-28/2012

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:16:40 -0500

Wunderkino (“wonder-cinema”) are moving images that ignite our curiosity and engagement, and help us to rethink questions of creativity, complexity, rarity and the multiple uses and understandings we might find in amateur and non-commercial films.

The 2012 Northeast Historic Film (NHF) Summer Symposium revisits the idea of Wunderkino, in a general call for proposals that aim to inform and expand our understanding of amateur and non-theatrical film. In 2011, the NHF Summer Symposium focused on assembling a “cabinet of cinematic curiosities.” This year, we are inviting proposals that feature amazing and extraordinary studies of amateur and non-theatrical films that offer lessons about culture, heritage, history, geography, performance, and the drama and comedy of social life. This year’s theme is an effort to draw upon the wide range of approaches that scholars, artists, filmmakers, and archivists are bringing to the study and use of amateur and non-theatrical film. We encourage (and expect) participants to incorporate interesting moving image excerpts as part of their presentations. NHF houses a 125-seat cinema with 35mm, 16mm, videotape, and DVD projection.

The NHF Summer Symposium is a multi-disciplinary gathering devoted to the history, theory, and preservation of amateur and nontheatrical moving images. For over a decade, the Symposium has been bringing together archivists, scholars, and artists in an intimate setting for three days of viewing and discussing lesser-known, amateur, and found films. NHF is located in Bucksport, a town of 5,000 on the coast of Maine (for more info on NHF, please visit: http://www.oldfilm.org). Presenters typically have 30-45 minutes in which to deliver their paper and engage in discussion with their colleagues. The symposium is open to archivists, artists and scholars from all disciplines. Please be advised that NHF is a non-profit organization. Unfortunately, we do not have resources to fund travel and lodging for conference presenters and participants. All presenters and participants must register for the symposium.

Please send 250-500 word abstracts outlining your paper ideas and a brief c.v. to the symposium organizers at the address below. We prefer e-mail submissions. We are happy to discuss your presentation ideas with you in advance of a formal submission. The Symposium Program Committee will begin reviewing proposals on April 11, 2012 and will finalize the program by May 11, 2012. Please send proposals and inquiries to: symposium@wunderkino.org

CFP: Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction, Proposed Anthology, Due May 1, 2012

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:04:24 -0500

In the last decade, stories of dystopian societies have become increasingly prevalent in young adult fiction, and almost all question young people’s places within such societies. Works such as Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, Ally Condi’s Matched, Veronica Roth’s Divergent, and Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone are particularly concerned with how their adolescent female protagonists’ navigation of social mores and structures give them virtually no control over the outcome of their lives. For example, in The Hunger Games Trilogy, Katniss Everdeen has learned from growing up in Panem, a country that willingly sacrifices its children to maintain control of their parents, that masking emotion is key to survival. Other protagonists, such as Matched’s Cassia and Delirium’s Lena, directly confront experiences of love and desire in societies that have eradicated such feelings.

While these female protagonists challenge the audience’s preconceptions of what it means to be a young woman--someone who is preoccupied with consumer culture, dating dilemmas, and high school cliques--the use of the dystopian genre raises the stakes of adolescent struggles regarding identity, agency, and community. These authors specifically place female protagonists in settings where they must rebel against society to take any control over their own lives and to improve the societies in which they live. Thus, through the realm of dystopian fiction, these authors argue that rebellion against authority allows young women to defy both social and gender expectations in order to become active agents in their own lives, rather than being passive recipients of social mores.

This proposed anthology seeks papers that consider how female protagonists are represented in contemporary young adult dystopian fiction. How are the authors of young adult dystopian fiction consciously (or unconsciously) reinforcing or challenging stereotypical characterizations of female protagonists?

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

•young women as rebels, leaders, or instigators
•young women as the head of the family
•war and its impact on young women
•young women who reject/question socially-constructed feminine virtues
•young women who challenge what it means to be a young women in their individual societies
•role of environment and circumstance in YA dystopian fiction
•claiming female agency in a dystopian society
•female protagonists in YA dystopians compared to female protagonists in more conventional YA novels (i.e., Gossip Girl, The It Girl, or Uglies)
•adolescent female rebellion in YA fiction

We are currently seeking a book contract for this anthology. Please submit a 500-word abstract and a brief CV by May 1, 2012 to: Sara K. Day, Miranda Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz at yadystopianfiction@gmail.com.

The Fluctuating Role of Male Homosocial Desire in Coetzee's Disgrace

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:48:32 -0500

Abstract
This paper explores the homosocial relationships and associations that the major character of the novel ‘Disgrace’, David Lurie has had with his male encountered people around him. David Lurie experiencing divorce twice is a fifty two year old university professor who has lost all his connections with both interior and exterior world. He has accustomed to take advantage of the prostitutes and other females in order to gratify his sexual desire which the climax one was the sex with his student that headed him to be fired from university. He has not got any profound dealing with any male person who makes him to be perplexed facing the ones who call him as a friend or close person to get advice. I will endeavor to indicate his bonds with his colleagues in trail, the most significant one with Melanie’s boyfriend Ryan who all three together_ Melanie, David Lurie and Ryan_ constructs a triangle love in urban setting, Melanie’s Father (the seduced student girl) Mr. Isaac, Bill Shaw who calls Lurie his friend and Petrus who works for his daughter in the rural setting. In order to achieve to this goal I am to apply American prestigious author and academic scholar in the field of Sociology and gender studies Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Book ‘Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire’ (1985) who popularized the Homosociality in the Globe by publishing this book and her methods in determining the relations’ influences and importance on the protagonist specially the love triangle which for the first time was introduced in sociology and literature by her.

II Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture - Peripheral Modernities - Lisbon, July 9-14 2012

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:20:34 -0500

The long history of the modern seems to stress that modernity was a privilege of Western rationality, disseminated from a European centre across the imaginary waiting rooms of history. Yet, the markers of what was hailed as the sign of Western advancement – industrialization, secularization and rationalization – have been consistently questioned over the past decade as indicators of universal validity and modernity itself reconceived beyond Western provincialism. Homi Bhabha thus conceives of a ‘contra-modernity’ to qualify the post-colonial as a stage that both mimicks and subverts Western modernity, Susan Friedman speaks of ‘polycentric modernities’ that enlarge the geographical scope of the modernization endeavour, whilst Argentinian critic Beatriz Sarlo has defined the Argentinian Modernism as the aesthetical counterpart of the specific South-American decentering into ‘peripheral modernities’.
The II Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture will take the manifold assumptions about modernity and its modernisms as the stepping stone to address the multiple ways in which the modern has been claimed. Although the distinction between modernity as a social-political construct and modernism as it aesthetic-cultural counterpart seems to be widely consensual, the neat separation between the two terms is not uncontentious, as the cultural does not exist beyond social framing and neither does the political occur beyond the aesthetic exploits of artists. This gap, stressed in the claim made by Adornian aesthetics’ that modernism reflects modernity’s critical self-awareness, seems to bring more problems than results for a complex mapping of the concept. In fact, the process of modernity is complex, because it brings together the social, the political, the cultural and the economical. It is simultaneously critical and hegemonic, imaginative and rational, dislocated and situated, global and local, traumatic and empowering.
The Summer School invites doctoral students and post-docs to submit theoretical discussions and case-study approaches from all fields of the humanities and the social sciences that consider modernity and modernism as other, diverse, fluid, translocal, plural, polycentric and alternative.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Arjun Appadurai (Univ. New York)
Ellen Sapego (Univ. Winsconsin)
Roberto Vecchi (Univ. Bologna)
Márcio Seligmann-Silva (Univ. Campinas, São Paulo)
Jorge Fazenda Lourenço (CECC – FCH|UCP)
António Sousa Ribeiro (Centre for Social Studies, Univ. Coimbra)
Ansgar Nünning (Univ. Giessen)
Vera Nünning (Univ. Heidelberg)
Elizabeth Bronfen (Univ. Zurich)
Xiaomei Chen (Univ. California)

CFP: Distinctions that Matter: Popular Literature and Material Culture (journal issue, abstract deadline: March 1, 2012)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:35:44 -0500

Essays are invited for a special issue of Belphégor that seeks to explore the relationship between distinctions of taste and textual production by examining how the materiality of literary texts influences and perhaps even determines their cultural status. In the nineteenth century, for example, printing and binding became cheaper, faster, and more easily accessible than ever before, which resulted in an explosion of print material. As printing costs decreased and print runs increased, the price of books became cheaper and publishers were able to attract more readers, which led to a greater demand for new content. The cultural impact of this shift was twofold. On the one hand, this decrease in printing costs lowered the cultural entrance level, which resulted in the expansion of popular or trivial literature as well as a wide range of new popular formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, comic books, and paperbacks. On the other hand, publishers also attempted to mimic the conventions of exclusiveness through printing and binding techniques in order to preserve the highbrow status of literature as a marker of class distinctions. This led to the rise of competing formats that attempted to challenge the perceived lowbrow status of popular literature, such as deluxe editions and graphic novels. As the divide between highbrow and lowbrow taste widened, the materiality of the text became the primary site where the cultural status of popular literature was both constructed and contested. The same issues also inform cultural debates concerning digital media, as cultural distinctions are now being reconfigured through new forms of electronic display in the post-print era.

Contributions are invited on any of the following topics:

-The impact of printing technologies on the production and distribution of literary texts.
-The relationship between the material properties of literary texts and their cultural status.
-The production and reception of popular literary formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, comic books, paperbacks, etc.
-The relationship between forms of electronic display and the cultural status of digital texts, such as blogs, e-books, e-readers, and cell phone novels.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 1,000 words by March 1, 2012. If an abstract is accepted, a full draft of no more than 10,000 words should be submitted by July 1, 2012. Papers may be submitted in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, or Portuguese. For more information, or to submit an abstract, please contact our guest editors:

Dr. Anthony Enns, Dalhousie University: anthony.enns@dal.ca
Dr. Bernhard Metz, Freie Universität Berlin: bernhard.metz@fu-berlin.de

Belphégor is an international refereed scholarly journal dedicated to the study of popular literature and media culture. The journal welcomes all types of theoretical analysis and encourages interdisciplinarity and comparative studies. Our goal is to stimulate discussion, research, and exchange between researchers of all stripes in the Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese-speaking worlds. For more information, please visit etc.dal.ca/belphegor.

Confined Spaces: Considering Performance, Madness, and Psychiatry

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:54:23 -0500

Madness and theatre are not unfamiliar bedfellows. Their twinned histories are in evidence since the earliest examples of literature. Eschewing the somewhat hazy link between madness and creativity, however, this interdisciplinary conference opens up a critical dialogue between mental ill health and theatre and asks how far performance might be a useful methodology for understanding and articulating alternative mental experiences. We are particularly concerned with the shifts in notions of mental ill health, its treatment, and its spaces from the late nineteenth century onwards and how this psychiatric and human history might speak to a concomitant theatre history. The conference is addressing what theatre practice has taken place in this period about this subject but also what performance work has taken place within its institutions. Moreover, it raises questions about the performativity of health and illness. The conference will also explore notions of space and place and interrogate the relationships between theatrical and medical environments. This conference, then, invites scholars and practitioners from all disciplines to share their research at the intersection between medicine and the arts, between science and culture. Papers are invited, but not limited to, the following areas:

 Theatre and psychiatric environments (hospitals, asylums, community settings)
 Madness and dramaturgy
 Stand up comedy and mental health
 Madness and architecture
 Madness and metaphor
 Madness and testimony
 Applied theatre in mental health contexts
 Madness, voice, and silence
 Madness and spectacle
 Madness and embodiment

The conference will feature a keynote paper from Professor Kay Redfield Jamison alongside papers from an international array of scholars including Professor Paul Crawford, Professor Ellen Kaplan, Professor Susan Cox, Dr Juliet Foster, Dr Anna Harpin and Dr Carina Bartleet. The conference will also include workshops and screenings from The Comedy School and Stand Up for Mental Health.

The AHRC supported conference is organised jointly by the University of Exeter and the University of Cambridge. For further information please contact Anna Harpin (a.r.harpin@exeter.ac.uk) or Juliet Foster (jlf1000@cam.ac.uk).

To propose a paper: Please send abstracts (up to 350 words) via email to Dr. Anna Harpin at: a.r.harpin@exeter.ac.uk, and Dr Juliet Foster at: jlf1000@cam.ac.uk by March 28, 2012.

To book online: Go to www.isolatedacts.org

Call for proposals: Collection on Paranormal cultures

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:31:18 -0500

Further chapters on specific areas sought for the Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures.

Following the University of Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies conference of 2010 'Paranormal Cultures', (UK) we are editing a large reference work of new research on the paranormal: the Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures. The book will have around 30 chapters written by scholars from the UK, USA and Europe, with many illustrations. It focuses specifically on contemporary and popular manifestations of the paranormal and cultural engagements with the paranormal, rather than the Spiritualism of the Victorian era, or Theosophy, for example, which has been covered elsewhere.
The main objective is to investigate the processes of every day life practices and discourses as well as textual engagements
that have a relation to the discourse of the paranormal. This includes forays into how people relate to the paranormal and why people seek meaning in the realm of the paranormal and how the notion of the paranormal is used to make meaning of
emotional, ideological and epistemological realities.
This book will be a valuable resource for cultural studies, humanities and sociological approaches to the recent
upsurge in cultural engagements with paranormal discourse that has been a growing research focus since the 1990s.

The project is already well established, with many chapters completed or at the editing stage. However, we are looking for contributions of 6,000 words on further material that we would like to include.
Chapters would require a short introduction to the field you are writing in/of the research context, followed by your case study and 2-3 suggested readings to follow up.
The date for submission for these later chapters would be June 1st. However, we would need an abstract sent to us by February 14th please, for us to consider and then to go forward with your idea.
The specific topics or areas that we require further content on are as follows:
1. Hollywood representations of the paranormal (eg. Sixth Sense, The Others, Paranormal Activity etc)

2. The Internet and digital paranormal cultures (paranormal sites and their users)

3. Paranormal tourism (ghost walks, supernatural tours etc)

4. Commodification/commercial paranormal services (the economic dimensions of paranormal 'industries')

5. Therapeutic usage of the paranormal

6. Issues in law and the paranormal (legal cases in which 'possession' was cited as defence, for example)

Please would you kindly forward this call to any other relevant lists.
Send your abstract/proposal to:
s.r.munt@sussex.ac.uk and o.jenzen@brighton.ac.uk

We look forward to hearing from you,
kind regards
Olu Jenzen and Sally R Munt

CFP - International Journal of Engineering (IJE)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:52:06 -0500

Computer Science Journals (CSC Journals) invites researchers, editors, scientists & scholars to publish their scientific research papers in an International Journal of Engineering (IJE) Volume 6, Issue 3.

International Journal of Engineering (IJE) is devoted in assimilating publications that document development and research results within the broad spectrum of subfields in the engineering sciences. The journal intends to disseminate knowledge in the various disciplines of the engineering field from theoretical, practical and analytical research to physical implications and theoretical or quantitative discussion intended for both academic and industrial progress.

Our intended audiences comprises of scientists, researchers, mathematicians, practicing engineers, among others working in Engineering and welcome them to exchange and share their expertise in their particular disciplines. We also encourage articles, interdisciplinary in nature.

CSC Journals anticipate and invite papers on any of the following topics:

Aerospace Engineering

Agricultural Engineering

Biomedical Engineering

Chemical Engineering

Civil & Structural Engineering

Computer Engineering

Control Systems Engineering

Education Engineering

Electrical Engineering

Electronic Engineering

Engineering Mathematics

Engineering Science

Environmental Engineering

Fluid Engineering

Geotechnical Engineering

Industrial Engineering

Manufacturing Engineering

Materials & Technology Engineering

Mechanical Engineering

Mineral & Mining Engineering

Nuclear Engineering

Optical Engineering

Petroleum Engineering

Robotics & Automation Engineering

Telecommunications Engineering

Important Dates - IJE CFP - Volume 6, Issue 3.
Paper Submission: March 31, 2012
Author Notification: May 15, 2012
Issue Publication: June 2012

For complete details about IJE archives publications, abstracting/indexing, editorial board and other important information, please refer to IJE homepage (http://www.cscjournals.org/csc/journals/IJE/description.php?JCode=IJE).

We look forward to receive your valuable papers. If you have further questions please do not hesitate to contact us at cscpress@cscjournals.org. Our team is committed to provide a quick and supportive service throughout the publication process.

A complete list of journals can be found at http://www.cscjournals.org/csc/bysubject.php

CFP - International Journal of Computer Science and Security (IJCSS)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:49:15 -0500

Computer Science Journals (CSC Journals) invites researchers, editors, scientists & scholars to publish their scientific research papers in an International Journal of Computer Science and Security (IJCSS) Volume 6, Issue 3.

The Journal of Computer Science and Security (IJCSS) is a refereed online journal which is a forum for publication of current research in computer science and computer security technologies. It considers any material dealing primarily with the technological aspects of computer science and computer security. The journal is targeted to be read by academics, scholars, advanced students, practitioners, and those seeking an update on current experience and future prospects in relation to all aspects computer science in general but specific to computer security themes. Subjects covered include: access control, computer security, cryptography, communications and data security, databases, electronic commerce, multimedia, bioinformatics, signal processing and image processing etc.

CSC Journals anticipate and invite papers on any of the following topics:

Authentication and authorization models

Bioinformatics

Communications and data security

Computer Engineering

Computer graphics

Computer Networks

Computer security

Cryptography

Data mining

Databases

Electronic commerce

Image processing

Object Orientation

Operating systems

Parallel and distributed processing

Programming languages

Robotics

Signal processing

Software engineering

Theory

Important Dates - IJCSS CFP - Volume 6, Issue 3.
Paper Submission: March 31, 2012
Author Notification: May 15, 2012
Issue Publication: June 2012

For complete details about IJCSS archives publications, abstracting/indexing, editorial board and other important information, please refer to IJCSS homepage (http://www.cscjournals.org/csc/journals/IJCSS/description.php?JCode=IJCS...)

A complete list of journals can be found at http://www.cscjournals.org/csc/bysubject.php

CFP - International Journal of Biometrics and Bioinformatics (IJBB)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:46:23 -0500

Computer Science Journals (CSC Journals) invites researchers, editors, scientists & scholars to publish their scientific research papers in an International Journal of Biometrics and Bioinformatics (IJBB) Volume 6, Issue 3.

The International Journal of Biometric and Bioinformatics (IJBB) brings together both of these aspects of biology and creates a platform for exploration and progress of these, relatively new disciplines by facilitating the exchange of information in the fields of computational molecular biology and post-genome bioinformatics and the role of statistics and mathematics in the biological sciences. Bioinformatics and Biometrics are expected to have a substantial impact on the scientific, engineering and economic development of the world. Together they are a comprehensive application of mathematics, statistics, science and computer science with an aim to understand living systems.

We invite specialists, researchers and scientists from the fields of biology, computer science, mathematics, statistics, physics and such related sciences to share their understanding and contributions towards scientific applications that set scientific or policy objectives, motivate method development and demonstrate the operation of new methods in the fields of Biometrics and Bioinformatics.

CSC Journals anticipate and invite papers on any of the following topics:

Bio-grid

Bio-ontology and data mining

Bioinformatic databases

Biomedical image processing (fusion)

Biomedical image processing (registration)

Biomedical image processing (segmentation)

Biomedical modelling and computer simulation

Computational genomics

Computational intelligence

Computational proteomics

Computational structural biology

Data visualisation

DNA assembly, clustering, and mapping

E-health

Fuzzy logic

Gene expression and microarrays

Gene identification and annotation

Genetic algorithms

Hidden Markov models

High performance computing

Molecular evolution and phylogeny

Molecular modelling and simulation

Molecular sequence analysis

Neural networks

Important Dates - IJBB CFP - Volume 6, Issue 3.
Paper Submission: March 31, 2012
Author Notification: May 15, 2012
Issue Publication: June 2012

For complete details about IJBB archives publications, abstracting/indexing, editorial board and other important information, please refer to IJBB homepage (http://www.cscjournals.org/csc/journals/IJBB/description.php?JCode=IJBB).

A complete list of journals can be found at http://www.cscjournals.org/csc/bysubject.php

[UPDATE] CFP: Science Fiction/Fantasy/Legend NEPCA (6/1/12; Rochester, NY 10/26-27/12)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:51:02 -0500

CALL FOR PAPERS
SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, AND LEGEND AREA
http://sf-fantasy-legend.blogspot.com/
2012 Conference of The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA)
St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York
26-27 October 2012
Proposals by 1 June 2012

Proposals are invited from scholars of all levels for papers to be presented in the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area. Presentations will be limited to 15-20 minutes in length (depending on final panel size) and may address any aspect of the intermedia genres of science fiction, fantasy, and/or legends as represented in popular culture produced in any country, any time period, and for any audience. Please see our website (http://sf-fantasy-legend.blogspot.com/) for further details and ideas.

If you are interested in proposing a paper or panel of papers, please send a proposal of approximately 300 to 500 words and a one to two page CV to both the Program Chair AND to the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area Chair at the following addresses (please note "SF/Fantasy/Legend Proposal" in your subject line):

Tim Madigan
Program Chair
tmadigan@sjfc.edu

Michael A. Torregrossa
Science Fiction, Fantasy and Legend Area Chair
Popular.Culture.and.the.Middle.Ages@gmail.com

The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA) is a regional affiliate of the American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Association. NEPCA is an association of scholars in New England and New York, organized in 1974 at the University of Rhode Island. We reorganized and incorporated in Boston in 1992. The purpose of this professional association is to encourage and assist research, publication, and teaching on popular culture and culture studies topics by scholars in the northeast region of the United States. By bringing together scholars from various disciplines, both academic and non-academic people, we foster interdisciplinary research and learning. We publish a newsletter twice per year and we hold an annual conference at which we present both the Peter C. Rollins Book Award and an annual prize.

Membership in NEPCA is required for participation. Annual dues are currently $30 for full-time faculty and $15 to all other individuals. Further details are available at http://users.wpi.edu/~jphanlan/NEPCA.html.

[UPDATE] Principles of Uncertainty: A Conference on Critical Theory

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:34:14 -0500

“Principles of Uncertainty”

A Conference on Critical Theory

Keynote Speaker: Martin Hägglund

The students of the Department of Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center present the first annual interdisciplinary conference on literary theory to be held Friday, May 4, 2012. This conference is being given in support of the CUNY Graduate Center’s proposed certificate for Critical Theory, which is dedicated to the study of literary and critical theory.

We invite papers from all disciplines focusing on works from any period that explore the theme of uncertainty as it pertains to literary and critical theory.

This conference welcomes papers centering upon any individual theorist, period, or school of critical theory, as well as comparisons of various theoretical approaches, including, but not limited to literary theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, gender studies, and political theory. Some of the questions this conference seeks to answer include, but are not limited to:

· How is the meaning of a text uncertain?

· Is this uncertainty purposefully placed within a text or a by-product of the act of reading?

· How is this uncertainty demonstrated in the relationship between author and reader?

· How can uncertainty be understood not only with respect to literature but in ethical, gendered, political, and/or social terms?

· How is identity shown to be uncertain?

· How does an “undecidable” future impact present ethical and political actions?

· How is history (whether of language, narrative, and/or society) destabilized and called into question?

· How does language contribute to the uncertainty of meaning and interpretation?

· How does the theorist’s own writing present the reader with an example of uncertainty?

· How does uncertainty function in the methodologies of interpretation and the making of meaning?

· Can a text have a stable meaning or is it always uncertain?

Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20 minute paper by March 1, 2012 to uncertaintyconference2012@gmail.com. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter’s name, institutional and departmental affiliation, and any technology requests. We also welcome panel proposals of three to four papers.

This conference is co-sponsored by:

The Writer’s Institute at the City University of New York Graduate Center: an un-MFA program devoted to bringing together the country’s most talented writers and today’s most celebrated editors.

The Doctoral Students’ Council: the sole policymaking body representing students in doctoral and master’s programs at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.