The deadline for the 2019 IASPM-US conference is coming up on October 1. The conference will be held March 7-10 in New Orleans, and this year’s theme is “Musical Cities: Music, Historiography and Myth.” For the call for papers and submission guidelines, click here.

Call for Papers

The 29th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf

'Fiction with footnotes': Writing art history as literary practice

Brighton, April 4 - 6, 2019
Deadline: Nov 5, 2018

Session at the Association for Art History Annual Conference, University of Brighton, April 4 - 6, 2019

CfP Deadline: Nov 5, 2018

How have social inhibitions and taboos been addressed by art throughout history? And today, in a climate marked by neoliberalism, and by such phenomena as the "hyper-sexualisation" of culture or the "pornification" of art itself, how are the limits of the permissible, of the "decent", and of freedom of expression being considered? Within the framework of so-called Western civilization, these issues summon up the battles waged around tensions between art, eroticism and pornography. Intensifying as the twentieth century progressed, such tensions reveal how the limits of what is socially permitted have been tied to sexual explicitness and erotic representation.

Since biofiction is gaining legitimacy as a literary category, refining its theoretical framework becomes crucial. One of the main aspects of this process is to understand the uses of a novelist’s freedom to create meaning by altering or complementing the information provided by historical documents. It is our claim that, far from entailing an unfamiliarity with sources or an arbitrary play, the freedoms that biofiction takes are strategic. They express the assimilation of facts into a narrative thread capable of revealing tangled or unspeakable truths that the documents can only suggest, and of inserting these truths into the crevices of dominant narratives.

The academic journal Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (http://www.sf-foundation.org/publications/foundation/index.html), supported by the Science Fiction Foundation at the University of Liverpool, UK, invites contributions for a special issue on Canadian science fiction. The special issue is guest edited by Heather Osborne (University of Calgary, Canada).

Sandra Cisneros: Intersections and Crossings

MELUS Annual Conference, Cincinnati, OH, March 21-24, 2019

Sandra Cisneros is perhaps best known for The House on Mango Street, a “little” book that explores the interior life of a Mexican American girl growing up in a Chicago neighborhood.  Although this close focus has tended to position Cisneros as a writer of the minor and the domestic, this panel will investigate the breadth and range of her work and career, positioning her and her work within an intersectional framework that attends in particular to ways in which Cisneros identifies herself and her work as expansively multi-ethnic and multi-national. 

The International Sidney Society invites proposals for two Sponsored Sessions at the Interational Congress on Medieval Studies focused on the life and work of Philip and Mary Sidney and/or the life and work of 16th and 17th century writers within their literary, religious, and political spheres of affiliation and influence.  We welcome both traditional and innovative imaginings of "the Sidney Circle." 

The Congress is the site of the International Sidney Society's annual meeting, bringing together leading scholars in the field with emerging voices.  The conference will be held May 9-12, 2019 at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Travel fellowships for graduate students are available on a competitive basis. 

STILL ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS

CALL FOR PAPERS

"Literary Tourgée"

Conference at Chautauqua Institution

Sept 27-29, 2019

Inquiries to Sandra Gustafson (gustafson.6@nd.edu)

Inviting proposals for panels and individual submissions

Proposal deadline:  15 January 2019

Send a 250-word proposal for a paper or panel and cv(s) of presenter(s) to

To broaden the conversation surrounding subjectivity, imperialism, gender and travel, this panel aims to advance the study of travel writing by considering performance as a category of significance to the understanding of the social production of travel narratives. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, in their introduction to New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (2015), establish a connection between performance and travel, claiming that performativity is a driving force behind the development of travel writing as a genre.

In this Author-meets-Reader roundtable, Martine Sonnet will discuss her work alongside 3-4 scholars working on French-language filiation narratives. Filiation narratives reflect an effort to recover aspects of one’s family history which were not transmitted to the author. The quest for information, garnered through various possible sources, is then incorporated into the narrative. We invite scholars working either on a filiation narrative subgenre or on Sonnet’s work in particular. Papers may be delivered in French or English.

Close to 100 years ago, T. F. Tout was able to claim in his magisterial six-volume study of England’s letter-writing offices that the administrative history of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England was "largely unwritten.” Within the last ten or twenty years, however, historians have undertaken socio-cultural studies of medieval bureaucracy and its personnel, moving from prosopographical and biographical sketches to nuanced examinations of the experience and challenges of bureaucratic employment throughout Europe.

CFP: MELVILLE’S ORIGINS (UPDATED)

New York University, New York, NY

June 17-20, 2019

Deadline for proposals: October 1, 2018