american

Roles: A Gender and Sexuality Forum

Third Annual Gender and Sexuality Conference

University of Birmingham,
10th May 2013

Key Note Speaker: Dr. Nadine Muller

This one-day interdisciplinary conference offers postgraduates the opportunity to present their research in a friendly and supportive environment. We invite applications for twenty-minute papers from researchers working within the fields of gender and sexuality studies. Suggestions for presentations may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

- social policy, government legislation, and matters of the law

- cultural products: film / music / art / TV / literature

- media, representation, and social images

We invite contributions for an upcoming volume of essays which examine the Victorian family through a queer lens. The Victorian family can be taken to mean the nineteenth-century nuclear or extended family, or the family of texts associated with the Victorian period (e.g. nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian texts). We are looking for exciting interrogations into the discourse of the Victorian family. These interrogations can focus on untraditional familial arrangements, non-normative relationships, polyamorous attachments, queer families in disparate communities/locations (e.g.

For a special session proposal for MLA 2014 (Chicago, Jan. 9-12). Seeking proposals for innovative presentations on temporalities in any national literature/culture in the decades surrounding 1800, with special interest in the sublime or other elements of Romantic aesthetics. Topics might include but are not limited to revolutionary time in France or Haiti, time and trauma, queering Romantic senses of time, exceptionalist temporality and American expansionism, kairos and British imperialism, the temporality of the Romantic artist.

The editors of the collection "Betrayal: Race, Class and Conscience in the Study of Folklore" are soliciting additional proposals for articles and essays that betray conventional notions about proper methods, theories and subjects within folklore and folklore studies. As a whole, this collection interrogates the unspoken assumptions and obligations that shape the types of cultural work deemed "proper" to be carried out by folklorists, whether the folklorists be hobbyists, academics, or in the public sector. We are especially interested in contributions that betray and/or subvert the discipline's conventions by investigating expressive traditions that are generated in and through popular or so-called "normative" cultures.

Watermark, an annual scholarly journal published by graduate students in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach, is now seeking papers for our seventh volume to be published in March 2012. Watermark is dedicated to publishing original critical and theoretical papers concerned with the fields of rhetoric and composition and literature of all genres and periods. As this journal is intended to provide a forum for emerging voices, only student work will be considered.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

2013 New England American Studies Association Spring Colloquium
American Studies: What, How, and Why
Saturday May 4th, 10am-1pm
Suffolk University Poetry Center
Boston, MA

The New England American Studies Association Council is excited to announce that NEASA's third annual Spring Colloquium will be held on Saturday, May 4th, between 10am and 1pm in Suffolk University's Poetry Center! The Colloquium will be entitled "American Studies: What, How, and Why," and will focus on defining disciplinary questions of what American Studies is, how we American Studiers do it, and why American Studies is worth supporting and strengthening in this time of educational crisis (and all other times).

Seeking papers that consider or challenge the ways in which Atlantic Canadian/New England literatures have been used to reinforce the Canada/U.S. border. This is a special session panel for the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago on the topic of "Writing (Beyond) Regionalisms in Northeastern North America." Inquiries welcome! Submit a 200-300 word abstract by 15 March 2013. rachel.bryant@unb.ca

Articles about urban fantasy and romance novels are invited for a new, multi-contributor collection.

During the last few decades, urban fantasy and paranormal romance novels have come to the forefront of the publishing world. Normative heroes and heroines have been joined by werewolves, vampires, mermaids, shape-shifters, centaurs and dragons, to name but a few. These magical creatures fill the pages of books and the screens of movie theaters in ever-increasing numbers.

Such a vast industry—one that generated at least 75 million readers in 2008 alone (and has been growing since)—deserves more study. This collection will offer critical examinations of both urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

Scientists recently found that migration was a main factor that shaped human behavior (Don Jones, Nature News). According to John Hines, the most extensive human migration took place in the early Middle Ages, while other large-scale migrations include the Puritan migration, the great Serb migrations, the migrations of the Middle Passage, and the nineteenth and twentieth century migrations of impoverished Europeans to the Americas. Apart from with poverty and religion, migration is also often associated with war; climate change becomes a factor that forces people to become migrants. Migration is a matter of geographic movement (diaspora), but also of human psychology (e.g. un-homing, longing, nostalgia, depression); of human rights (e.g.

Abstracts examining the theme of "vulnerable times" in Hughes's texts. Presenters must join the Modern Language Association and Langston Hughes Society. 250 word abstract and CV by 10 March 2013; Sharon Lynette Jones (sharon.jones@wright.edu).

Animal and Artistic Life
Does capital's expansion over life link the vulnerabilities of animal life to those of artistic life? Can their vulnerabilities be addressed simultaneously? Send abstracts to gvarner@purdue.edu or mapplega@gmail.com by 8 March 2013.

Call for Contributions, Thinking Verse vol. III, 'Scansion'.

We are now accepting abstracts for the fourth annual New Critics: Undergraduate Literature and Composition Conference, which will be held on the SUNY Oneonta campus (Oneonta, NY) on Saturday, April 20, 2013. The deadline for abstract submissions (sent to me via email attachment)is Monday, March 4. We are solicting abstracts for critical undergraduate papers on any subject in literature or composition. Film and other popular culture critical work is also of interest. Accepted papers must be readable in no more than 15 minutes. This conference is free to attend. This year, we are very proud to have noted scholar, Dr. Jonathan Culler (Cornell), as our keynote speaker.

Call for Abstracts