This session seeks to use the concept of the absent present (that which is embodied by students but unacknowledged) within the classroom as a method of disclosure. Such a method is dedicated to both the literal and figurative spaces that foster agency for students and instructors as they embody and articulate multiple critical identities. Particular focus will be placed on the ways student backgrounds and identities are erased or ignored through various means including syllabi, modeled language, instructor feedback, and assignment and assessment structures. Attention to that which is present within our students but goes unacknowledged or undervalued allows for the exploration of ways to better foster more inclusive spaces.

CFP: Celebrating WPA, 1979–2019: Forty Years of Research, Collaboration, and Community

The editors of WPA: Writing Program Administration seek proposals for a variety of historical works to be included in a special issue of the journal to appear in summer 2019. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of WPA as a peer-reviewed publication and celebrate this journal’s evolutionary and revolutionary contributions to the field of writing program administration, we encourage proposals for the following:

Call for Presentations:

The Third Annual Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference at StokerCon 2019

Abstract Submission Deadline: October 31, 2018

The Third Annual Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference at StokerCon 2019

Conference Dates: May 9 – 12, 2019

Conference Hotel: Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, Grand Rapids, MI

“Contemporary Humanities”

Recognizing that the New World economy was historically based on the system of slavery and that the United States came into being as a slave-holding nation, we experience the lasting effects of slavery in all facets of contemporary US society and culture. This panel seeks papers analyzing contemporary representations of slave history from the black and white perspectives. While we are very familiar with African American representations of slavery in a number of cultural media, this panel is particularly interested in how contemporary representations of slavery created by people of European descent differ from those of African Americans. How is slavery remembered differently in black and white?

As recent literary and cultural critics have shown, food, and its presence in literature and film, is not solely linked to corporeal survival. The relationship between food and the body is also one of chemical and physical processes, and of tolerance and rejection (both individual and societal). Food—eating, preparation, choice—therefore also embodies social and cultural nuances and, in their evolution, processes of change. What is more, in the acts of consumption and digestion, food can re-emerge in various, and often socially taboo, ways and, in so doing, highlight sociocultural boundaries and normativities. In other words, food not only reflects on individual biological needs, but it also exposes larger social ontologies.

“Audacity” is having a moment in the women’s movement. Festivals, conferences and training sessions have used the term as shorthand for women speaking their truth and owning the power to direct the outcomes of their lives. (The Audacious Women Festival in Scotland and the Audacious Women’s Network in South Africa are two examples.)

Yet audacity is not new. Throughout history, outspoken women writers of fiction, poetry, and plays have positioned themselves in the vanguard of audacity, defying public censure and personal isolation to write candidly about their world. Transgression is a disruptor of patriarchal norms. Candor is transformational when it is deployed to pose questions, shatter stereotypes, and incite change.

According to Walter Mignolo (2013, 2007), the triumphal narrative of modernity is inseparable from coloniality, or the logic of domination, exploitation, and oppression. While modernity builds itself on a triumphal narrative of civilization, progress, and development, modernity hides its darker side, “coloniality.” “Modernity/coloniality” shows that while modernity materializes in the rhetoric of salvation, modernity, capitalism, and coloniality are inseparable aspects yoked to authority and the control of economy. The first conceptualizations of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, launched by Quijano (2007), focus on economic-political dimensions and the question of knowledge and racism.

The quest for science and progress at the expense of ethical concerns of (animal) pain is laid bare in Chapter XIV, “Doctor Moreau Explains,” of H. G. Wells’s science fiction The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). In this chapter, Edward Prendick, protagonist and narrator, discovers that the creatures he has previously encountered on the deserted island are not “animalized victims . . . animal-men," but what Moreau refers to as “humanized animals—triumphs of vivisection” instead. At this juncture, Prendick hears from Moreau “‘[his] colourless delight of . . . intellectual desires,’” which has led the doctor to experiment on different animals to gauge their malleability and submission to human will.

This panel seeks to explore representations of transnational space and transcultural memory in literature of French expression. Whether through exile, immigration, travel, migritude, errance, or the meanderings of the flâneur/flâneuse, francophones have traversed a wide global terrain. Just as authors integrate place into their creations, they in turn leave their stamp on the memories and associations that accrue to any geographical location. Cultural production then reflects and inflects shifting identitarian configurations.

The topic of this seminar is the presence of the “chicas raras” in Modern Spanish literature, also known as “queer women” in English. Queer is the perfect conceptual framework to think about how Spanish authors explore feminist themes, such as discrimination or inequality using their narratives as a tool to examine tensions in female subjectivity. The concept queer includes the idea of gender dissidence that encompasses how female intellectuals experience sex, sexuality and, gender. Even if oftentimes these writers have difficulties conceptualizing these notions, they are perceptible in women narratives, especially through specific genres: autobiography, memoir, romance fiction and letters.

Please consider submitting an abstract for the roundtable on New Representations of Motherhood in the Literature of the New Millennium, NeMLA Convention, Washington, DC, March 21-24, 2019.

Compared to a few decades ago, the birth rate in many Western countries has dramatically decreased and the roles and representations of maternal figures have changed significantly. Through IVF, gamete donation and surrogacy, motherhood is no longer defined univocally, and family structures have evolved accordingly. This panel seeks at investigating how biotechnology, social and family changes, law, and religion inform the representations of motherhood in the literature of the new millennium from an interdisciplinary perspective. 

Science Fiction has always functioned as a literary multi-purpose vehicle in which writers are able to explore potentialities of the human condition. Even though sci-fi has been maligned by many as a poorly constructed near-juvenile literary form, scholars have discovered that sci-fi also provides a path from which one can bear witness into past practices and analyze the possibilities for the future.  The focus of this roundtable is to assess the influence of American science fiction writers to discuss the topics and techniques Harlan Ellison, Phillip K.

This call is for an accepted session at the 50th Northeast Modern Language Association convention in Washington DC, March 21-24, 2019.  

Chair: Nathan Douglas / Indiana University, Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese