TECHNOLOGY AND LITERATURE

Boston University Romance Studies Graduate Student Conference

Saturday, April 27th, 2019

Call for Papers

Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies is a refereed, peer-reviewed, and born-digital journal devoted to the culture, literature, history, and society of the medieval past. Published semi-annually, the journal collects exceptional examples of work by graduate students on a number of themes, disciplines, subjects, and periods of medieval studies. We also welcome book reviews of monographs published or re-released in the past five years that are of interest to medievalists. For the Fall/Winter 2018 issue we are particularly interested in papers and reviews of books which fall under the current special topic.

11-12 June 2019

University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Department of Historical Studies

Keynote speakers:
Hans-Peter Söder (Munich)
China Mills (Sheffield)

Transient Crossings: Exploring, Constructing and Deconstructing Borders

The English Graduate Organization (EGO) and Composition and TESOL Association (CTA), in collaboration with the Department of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, is proud to announce their 2019 Interdisciplinary Conference, “Transient Crossings: Exploring, Constructing, and Deconstructing Borders,” to be held April 5-6, 2019 at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP).  The due date for proposals is January 15, 2019.

Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies (published online by the Open Library of Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London) seeks reviews of recent publications, including autobiographies, memoirs, letters, and so on. We don't accept reviews of critical or cultural theory. Word length: 1000-1500 words. Citation style: Chicago, 16th edition (author/date). Deadline for submission: April 5th, 2019. Please contact the Reviews Editor, Robert Ward, with short proposals and questions (Robert_P_Ward@brown.edu).

The William Dean Howells Society will host two panels at the upcoming American Literature Association Conference in Boston, May 23-26, 2019. 

1. William Dean Howells and the Affective Turn 

The paper submission deadline for SCSECS 2019 has been extended to Friday, December 14. A full list of panels can be found at scsecs.net. Please submit abstracts directly to the panel chair. If you don't see a panel that fits your paper idea, you can submit a proposal to conference co-organizer Ashley Bender at abender@twu.edu. 

Chair and Organizer: Dewey W. Hall (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona)

The Parthenon Sculptures have long been a source of disparagement and fascination, especially since their arrival in London as early as 1803. Prior to that year, Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, procured a collection now housed in the British Museum as the Elgin Marbles, intensifying a transformation in which materiality of the marbles has been infused with seemingly vital force through an after-life of aesthetic representation. Whether through drawings, paintings, or poetry, the Elgin Marbles as objects have animated their subjects—pensive in gaze—to motivate, in effect, proliferation through aesthetic production.

While the word “community” is more often than not suffused with a benevolent glow, connoting the virtues purportedly associated with groups of people—shared values and heritage, constancy and solidarity—“neighbourhood” is a term that has a more ambiguous, even troublesome, valency. Neighbourhoods, depending on one’s point of view, can be good or bad, welcoming or hostile, safe or dangerous, dull or vibrant. They can also, in both their physical and figurative senses, change over time, beset by vagaries, be they sociological, geographical, political, moral or even psychological..These changes can be existential—neighbourhoods come and go, they die out or are subsumed into larger ones, or are supplanted by newer geographical collectivities.

Call for Papers: 

Aesthetic Time, Decadent Archives
Keynote: Joseph Bristow, “Decadent Historicism”
Goldsmiths, University of London
18-19 July 2018

“PLAY” Conference
Texas Tech University
April 13, 2019 

The Humanities Center at Texas Tech University (Lubbock, Texas) is happy to announce a call for papers for our second Annual Conference in the Humanities, to be held in Lubbock on April 13, 2019.  The conference topic each year aligns with the Center's annual theme, which for 2018-2019 is "PLAY.” We are interested in the interdisciplinary study of play in myriad forms and in any of the following categories: art, culture, literature, music, dance, games, sports, politics, technology, and education. This list is open-ended and, in the spirit ofplay, we are open to proposals that catch us by intellectual surprise.

This panel seeks proposals on theater and performance of the long eighteenth-century, especially those that address the theme of perspective. Essays might consider the way that perspective functioned thematically in plays and other public performances, such as opera, dance, and music, and the ways that perspective (e.g., perspective scenery) affected the material conditions of performance. What perspectives did eighteenth-century audiences have on theater and performance? How did these perspectives in the public discourse shape the drama and performances of the period, and how was eighteenth-century society shaped by these cultural institutions?

Though usually relegated to second status critically, the short story is having a moment. When Canadian writer Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013, it was specifically for her contribution to the short story genre. As a writer who does not write novels, she acknowledged the importance of the award: “It’s a wonderful thing for the short story.” Indeed.

Ecocritical essays wanted on Arthurian legend