This panel will explore the 'cognitive turn' in literary studies as it emerges in contemporary American fiction and non-fiction. Since George H. W. Bush declared the 1990's the "decade of the brain," there has been a surge of cross-disciplinary work done at the site of cognitive studies, neuroscience and the humanities. For example, scholars such as Lisa Zunshine and Paul John Eakin have called for literary methodologies that account for cognition and perception in their analyses. Additionally, a growing number of fiction and non-fiction texts use cognitive studies and neuroscientific research to upend generic constraints, as well as challenge assumptions about how we construct, perceive, and describe the world and ourselves within it.

Since the early 1990's, the internet has increasingly influenced how cultural texts are read and disseminated. This media shift has transformed long-held notions of publicness, authority, and the archive. For media scholar Lisa Gitelman, media history is about nothing less than the 'experience of meaning' (18), an experience that the web has changed by 'eschew[ing] the punctual logic of more conventional public discourse' (144). This panel enters ongoing debates about the internet's influence on literature, critics, and their publics, exploring how new media's social network shapes fiction and the critical reading practices that make sense of it.

Call for Panels and Papers

Writing by Degrees 2012
October 19-20th, 2012
Binghamton, New York
The Bundy Museum

Keynote Speakers
Marie Howe
Christine Sneed

Writing by Degrees, the nation's oldest graduate-run creative writing conference, is now accepting paper and panel proposals for its 2012 event—a two-day celebration of writing, pedagogy, and community building at Binghamton's historic Bundy Museum.

British Association for American Studies
58th Annual Conference
18-21 April 2013
Hosted by the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter
www.ex.ac.uk/humanities/research/conferences/baas2013

Plenary Speakers

Paul Gilroy
Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics

Dolores Hayden
Professor of Architecture, Urbanism and American Studies at Yale University

Anders Stephanson
Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Professor of History at Columbia University

Dictionary of Literary Biography, which has grown to nearly 400 volumes since the inaugural 1978 volume, continues to be among the most highly esteemed reference works available to students and scholars. Library Journal remarked in 2006, "It is hands-down the best overall literary reference work ever published, a proverbial diamond as big as the Ritz..." DLB provides clear, comprehensive literary biographies on important figures spanning every genre, nation and era, written by many of the most prominent literary scholars in the field.

La toma de la palabra: Actores, acciones y agendas literarias y teatrales en América Latina.

Es necesario pensar el hecho literario más allá de su propia existencia como texto e incorporar al quehacer crítico el examen de su circulación: desde su producción editorial, su circulación comercial, su lectura, crítica, adopción académica, o, bien sus puestas en escena, adaptaciones. Por decirlo de otro modo, es necesario prestar atención a las figuras que adquiere la fidelidad a un acontecimiento literario.

Este congreso plantea un diálogo vivo entre críticos, editores, autores y animadores culturales, en que se combinen las ponencias académicas de corte tradicional con mesas redondas donde lo que predomine sea el diálogo abierto.

Literature/Film Quarterly, an international journal in adaptation studies with subscriptions in over 30 countries and now in its 40th year of production at Salisbury University, announces a new award for graduate students, the Thomas Erskine Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Adaptation Studies. The winning essay will be the lead piece of the journal issue immediately following the bestowal of the award, and the winning student will have three years of free subscription to Literature/Film Quarterly as well as five copies of the journal featuring their essay. The recipient of the award will be announced on the LFQ website as well as being honored in the introductory editorial of that issue which features their work.