PAMLA 2019 - Grotesque Realism: The Body and its Functions in the Contemporary American Novel 

Embodying Romanticism

Romantic Studies Association of Australasia 2019 Conference

21 - 23 November 2019

UNSW Canberra Northcott Drive

Canberra ACT 2600 Australia

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Professor Will Christie, Australian National University

Professor Kevin Gilmartin, California Institute of Technology

Associate Professor Kevis Goodman, University of California Berkeley

Professor Clara Tuite, University of Melbourne

Call for Papers

Archives of Afro-Asia: Excavating the Cultural Politics of the Early Decolonisation Era 

Wits University, Johannesburg, 1-2 October 2019

We are currently soliciting unpublished, quality research articles/case studies in the fields of ELT, Linguistics, Literature, Discourse and Translation Studies for Volume: 07, Issue: 03 [July-September, 2019 Issue] of IJ-ELTS.  

The papers can address issues in/related to the following research disciplines-

In “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” Umberto Eco asks the question: “What would Ruskin, Morris, and the pre-Raphaelites have said if they had been told that the rediscovery of the Middle Ages would be the work of the twentieth-century mass media?”

Indeed, the twentieth-century mass media has disseminated what Eco calls, “escapism à la Tolkien” which has influenced many modern writers and cultural producers in other mass media such as films and video games. Although such “escapism à la Tolkien,” or “Tolkienesque” fantasy, seems harmless as pure entertainment, its consumption is massive, and many picture the Middle Ages not as it actually was, but how it is depicted through medievalist fantasy.

This panel is focused on the employment of fashion by female-identifying authors to discuss issues of inequity, specifically surrounding the themes of gender, sexuality, race, and class in their writing. In this panel, the relationship between text and the sartorial and the capitalization on this relationship by female-identifying authors will be explored. Given the focus of this panel on centering voices across cultures, we especially welcome papers discussing global texts, authors writing in all languages, and analyzing works written from non-Western perspectives.

A playwright has to build their story within their allotted two hours of stage traffic. We are taken on a guided ride from which we glimpse what the playwright chooses, forming our layers of knowledge through which we are manipulated. Often we are privy to the internal thoughts of a character which contrast with their public utterances: e.g., Rosalind/Ganymede, Angelo, or Richard III. Our prescient view makes Macduff's seemingly banal inquiry about his wife and children emotive fire. Our own knowing is challenged just by taking in a play as we know it is not real, yet we embrace the illusion.

The 2020 Annual Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Conference
February 15–16, 2020
Deutsches Haus at New York University
New York, NY

After the Welfare State: Reconceiving Mutual Aid

Keynote Speaker: Catherine Malabou, Kingston University and University of California, Irvine.

Conference Description

The shift from the margins to the mainstream has occurred simultaneously, over the last few decades, for two groups that now jointly exert a central influence over contemporary culture and politics: female r’n’b and hip-hop artists, and feminist thinkers and activists. The coming together of these two groups and sensibilities has redefined contemporary popular music (in all senses of musics of black origin), and wider culture and politics, in the West – from the banlieues to the White House, from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo, from Betty Davis to Neneh Cherry, TLC to Aaliyah, Alicia Keys to Iggy Azalea, Beyonce to Ariana Grande, and all points in between.

How does pedagogical strategizing work in teaching Global South Asian literatures in majority serving institutions located in areas where the student body is mostly white, or lacking in South Asian immigrant groups? How does South Asian literature find a place in general education core courses? What are some current practices and challenges that scholars of color specializing in and including South Asia as a text, experience in their classrooms? We are interested in sharing experiences on teaching, planning courses, writing curriculum development projects including South Asia centric courses both for the major and the general education classes that embrace the inclusion of literatures from the global South, especially from South Asia.

This panel seeks poets writing in the narrative tradition whose poems capture the personal and the public, recording and reflecting on our world by summoning the language and creating the identity of our culture. Panelists will read from their original work and then take audience questions. The Northeast MLA conference takes place March 5-8 in Boston, MA. Submit a sample poem and a short description of your narrative work by September 30. Must submit via link on NeMLA website: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18130

Call for Papers

Videogames have grown into a global socio-cultural phenomenon and are now a primary concern of Literary and Cultural Studies as well as the Social Sciences. In a medium that sweeps across geographies (including virtual ones), however, the discourse usually privileges a certain section  when it comes to the representation of identity. In a medium, where roleplaying and playing in character is of prime importance, such an ignoring of the marginal and the diverse is indeed problematic.

There is a gathering consensus that television began to undergo a marked transformation at the end of the twentieth century. Two decades into the twenty-first century, an ever-increasing number of cable and streaming series imaginatively conjure the emergence of a world liquidated of normative authority, saturated with media-technological developments, and struggling to find its bearings in the fray. In New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre, Martin Shuster refers to this still-unfolding genre as “new television” on account of both its relatively new narrative coordinates and its efforts to think through the bewildering contours of a rapidly changing world.

Language has always played a key role in the shaping and sharing of identities. Not only does it have the power to create community among people coming from different geographical locations, but most importantly it influences the way we perceive and make sense of the world. For these reasons, the use of language in science fiction —a genre that offers a critical space for "registering tensions related to the defining of national identity and the modernization process" (Ferreira, 2011)— is important as it enables readers to explore alternative realities. This could also be said about speculative fiction. Thus, this panel addresses concerns over reinvented identities through science fiction and across historical periods.