category: bibliography and history of the book

JOHN BERRYMAN: A CENTENARY CELEBRATION (24-25 October 2014)

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:17:41 -0400

Born in Oklahoma in 1914, John Berryman is one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century. Recognised from the beginning of his publishing career as a poet and critic of distinction, his books of poetry and prose are among the most important works by any writer in English in the period up to the early 1970s. Since his death in 1972, further posthumously published works have added to his oeuvre, marking him out as one of the most brilliant poetic and critical minds of his generation.

This two-day conference, to be held between the University of Minnesota and Trinity College Dublin, will celebrate Berryman’s mind and its lasting influence by considering his legacy in a number of respects. It will involve reflections on Berryman as teacher and scholar by some of those who knew him, as well as an opportunity for those doing new research to discuss his work. The field of Berryman Studies is as wide open in 2013-14 as it was when the journal John Berryman Studies was published in the 1970s. One of the aims of this conference, therefore, will be to look back at the work that has been done on Berryman in the decades since his death, but the event will also provide a forum to discuss areas that remain uncharted, including projects currently being undertaken in University of Minnesota Libraries and Special Collections and Berryman’s lasting influence on poets and other creative artists who came after him.

Proposals are invited for twenty-minute papers on any aspect of John Berryman’s writing, published or unpublished, in verse or prose. Individuals interested in participating in the conference should send proposals of no more than 300 words, with a short biographical note indicating institutional affiliation (if available), to berryman2014@gmail.com by the 25th of October 2013. A provisional conference programme with additional details will be made available in January 2014.

Exegesis CFP 'Landscapes: Real, Digital, Imagined

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:29:52 -0400

Landscapes: Real, Digital, Imagined

‘Any landscape is a condition of the spirit’
- HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL

Exegesis, the peer-reviewed academic e-journal of the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, is now accepting submissions for the Autumn 2013 edition on 'Landscapes: Real, Digital, Imagined'. For this issue we hope to attract creative writing dealing with the notion of landscape, broadly considered, as well as literary, historical and other critical readings informed by considerations of space, form and location. Authors may choose to investigate this topic literally, metaphorically, or theoretically, and in terms of specific texts, authors, times, or places. Articles and creative pieces might address, but are not limited to, any of the following subjects:

Natural landscapes: forests, rivers, mountains
Man-made landscapes: the city, the road
Transitory landscapes: weather, the seasons, natural disasters
Fantasy landscapes: utopias, dreamscapes, extra-terrestrial worlds
Imagined landscapes: migration and memory
Journeys: on foot, by car, at sea
Conservation and destruction: heritage, environmentalism, ecocriticism
Regional landscapes: within Britain, Europe, the world
Pastoral: its meanings and history
Psychological: landscapes of the mind
Literary movements and the landscapes they reflect (and reflect on)
The digital landscape and a place for the humanities
Aesthetics, style and form: reading a landscape
Domestic landscapes: interiors, homes

We welcome previously unpublished essays, short articles, reviews, and creative pieces on each issue’s theme from postgraduate research students and early career academics. Essays and short articles should be between 4000-6000 words. Creative pieces are welcomed of no more than 5000 words.

Exegesis is also interested in analytical exhibition, film, theatre, conference, and book reviews of 800 – 1000 words (including references) on the broad theme of ‘British Cultural Landscapes’. Please ensure that books reviewed were published within the last three years, and that other events reviewed occurred within the last six months. Exegesis is particularly interested in covering exhibitions running across the United Kingdom.

Submission deadline is Monday 22 July 2013. Please submit via the following email addresses:

To submit a critical work, critical@exegesisjournal.org
To submit a creative work, creative@exegesisjournal.org
To submit a book review, reviews@exegesisjournal.org

Please include your name, academic affiliation, the title of your submission, 5-7 keywords, and a 3-5 sentence abstract of the article or review piece.

Please note: All submissions must adhere to MHRA style guidelines. Additionally, we now require submissions to be in our Submission Template which can be found at www.exegesisjournal.org; please read the instructions within the template closely.

Banquets and Borders in Language and Literature October 25-26, 2013

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:40:55 -0400

CFP: Banquets and Borders in Language and Literature

The English Graduate Organization (EGO) of Western Illinois University is currently seeking both individual papers and panel proposals for our tenth annual EGO Conference in Macomb, IL on October 25 – October 26. We are interested in the production, consumption and the symbolism of the culinary within and beyond English Studies. Our conference will feature a keynote speech by Dr. David B. Goldstein entitled “Toward a Skeptical Ethics of Eating: Shakespeare, Montaigne, Levinas.”

Our keynote speaker, Dr. David B. Goldstein (PhD, Stanford University), is an associate professor of English and coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at York University in Toronto, Canada. He has published articles on Emmanuel Levinas and eating, Titus Andronicus and American cannibalism, and Martha Stewart and domestic labor. His forthcoming works on food and hospitality include a scholarly monograph Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Fall 2013) and the SEL article “The Price of Pork: Jews, Scots, and Pigs in The Merchant of Venice” (2014). In addition, Dr. Goldstein is a widely published poet and a founding member of the Wa-KOW! art collective. A former restaurant critic and journalist, his food writing has appeared in SAVEUR, The New York Sun, and numerous other publications.

Paper topics (both creative and critical) may include, but are not limited to the following:

Colonization and food
Consumption and Consumerism
Cooking in popular culture
Culinary histories
Culinary intersectionality
Culinary Travelogues
Cultures of the Raw
Ethics of food
Excess and overindulgence
Food and consuming motifs in literature
Food and Globalization
Food in visual culture
Gender and food
Hospitality
Landscapes of Food
Pedagogy of Food and Eating
Psychology and/of food
Representations of the culinary in film
Rhetoric of food
Rituals of consumption & abstinence
Socioeconomics of fictional cuisine
Sustainability

The EGO conference intends to explore all areas of English Studies, including pedagogy, cultural studies, creative writing, literary studies, linguistics, and critical/literary theory. Furthermore, we welcome interdisciplinary interest and participation, and encourage scholars from all areas of the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences who have an interest in food or consumption-related studies to submit proposals.

Please send 250-word abstracts (and any questions) to ego@wiu.edu by September 5, 2013.

We also welcome submissions by post: English Graduate Organization, Department of English & Journalism, 1 University Circle, Macomb IL 61455-1390.

For further information, please visit our website: www. wiu.edu/cas/english_and_journalism/ego/

Landscapes: Digital, Real, Imagined

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 05:26:48 -0400

Exegesis, the peer-reviewed academic e-journal of the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, is now accepting submissions for the Autumn 2013 edition on Landscapes: Real, Digital, Imagined. For this issue we hope to attract creative writing dealing with the notion of landscape, broadly considered, as well as literary, historical and other critical readings informed by considerations of space, form and location. Authors may choose to investigate this topic literally, metaphorically, or theoretically, and in terms of specific texts, authors, times, or places. Articles and creative pieces might address, but are not limited to, any of the following subjects:

Natural landscapes: forests, rivers, mountains
Man-made landscapes: the city, the road
Transitory landscapes: weather, the seasons, natural disasters
Fantasy landscapes: utopias, dreamscapes, extra-terrestrial worlds
Imagined landscapes: migration and memory
Journeys: on foot, by car, at sea
Conservation and destruction: heritage, environmentalism, ecocriticism
Regional landscapes: within Britain, Europe, the world
Pastoral: its meanings and history
Psychological: landscapes of the mind
Literary movements and the landscapes they reflect (and reflect on)
The digital landscape and a place for the humanities
Aesthetics, style and form: reading a landscape
Domestic landscapes: interiors, homes

Exegesis is also interested in analytical exhibition, film, theatre, conference, and book reviews of 800 - 1000 words (including references) on the broad theme of 'British Cultural Landscapes'. Please ensure that books reviewed were published within the last three years, and that other events reviewed occurred within the last six months. Exegesis is particularly interested in covering exhibitions running across the United Kingdom.

Submission deadline is Monday 22 July 2013. Please submit via the following email addresses:

To submit a critical work, critical@exegesisjournal.org.
To submit a creative work, creative@exegesisjournal.org.
To submit a book review, reviews@exegesisjournal.org.

Please include your name, academic affiliation, the title of your submission, 5-7 keywords, and a 3-5 sentence abstract of the article or review piece.

Please note: All submissions must adhere to MHRA style guidelines. For complete style guidelines, please refer to the website www.exegesisjournal.org. Please read the instructions within the guidelines closely and adhere to the submission template.

If you have any questions, please email Kelly Centrelli at chief.editor@exegesisjournal.org.

CFP: Disaster Planning for Archives and Their Communities (CFP deadline August 1, 2013; symposium October 7, 2013)

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:58:52 -0400

As we approach the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, train service has been restored to the Rockaways and City beaches have opened for the summer, however many archives, libraries, museums and homes have only just begun to get back to “normal” and others are still a long way away. In the spirit of Archives Week it is appropriate to take time to look back at what happened, what went wrong, what went right, and what can be done differently next time.

The Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York, in conjunction with the Center for Jewish History, is organizing a one-day symposium with the aim of bringing together archivists, records managers, librarians, museum professionals, emergency responders, disaster recovery professionals, volunteers and the general public to address how professional and citizen archivists as well as related professionals can both better protect their collections from disaster and also become a resource for the larger community in disaster situations.

Possible areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

Case studies and “lessons learned” from Sandy or other disasters
Protecting personal and family records -- providing outreach to the general public

Continuity of operations and logistics -- how to get back up and running after a disaster

Navigating FEMA and other disaster relief assistance

Preventative care of collections versus post-disaster recovery

Lone arrangers and small shops -- how can small archives band together to help one another?

Using a disaster to advocate within your organization -- making the archive valuable during a disaster

Archivists as volunteers -- fostering a culture of giving and creating a network of archivist volunteers

Disaster planning and recovery on a budget

How archives and cultural institutions fit into the larger emergence response picture, especially post-Katrina

Keeping up morale, resources and volunteer support weeks and months after a disaster

Disaster planning for born-digital and electronic records
Protecting vital records for both the archive and the larger organization

Archiving disaster -- how does a significant event like 9/11 change the normal retention of records? what is the role of the archivist? how are records appraised?

Man-made versus natural disasters -- the international perspective, especially in areas subject to armed conflict

Advocating for archives during larger disaster situations when disaster recovery resources and relief are stretched

Date: Monday, October 7, 2013
Location: Center for Jewish History, New York, NY

All individual presentations will be 20 minutes long (10 page paper).
Submissions must include a title, name of author and institutional affiliation (if applicable), abstract (250 words max) and indication of technological requirements.
Individual papers or entire panel proposals accepted.

Deadline for Proposals: Proposals should be emailed to admin@nycarchivists.org by August 1, 2013.

CFP: Postgraduate English, Issue 27 (Deadline: 15 August 2013)

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:59:36 -0400

POSTGRADUATE ENGLISH (ISSN 1756-9761). The University of Durham’s Online Literature Journal: a peer-reviewed Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English.

Postgraduates are invited to submit papers of not more than 7,000 words for Issue 27 of Postgraduate English. Contributors are not confined to a particular theme, the better to reflect a diversity of interests.

Papers, in MLA style, must be received no later than 15th August 2013. We also invite book reviews for the next issue. Please contact the editors in advance with details of the book you wish to review. When submitting your work, please put the name of your institution, the full title of your programme, and the title of the essay, and include an email address and keywords for reference.

We are happy to advertise postgraduate conferences in the UK and Europe on request. For more information about the journal, and to read current and previous issues, please visit our website:http://www.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english/

Please send submissions and Forum content to the editors, Avishek Parui and Michael Shallcross, via pgeng.submissions@durham.ac.uk

CFP - Lacan and Early Modern Literature - SAMLA 2013, Atlanta, GA

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:10:08 -0400

Southeast Renaissance Conference - SAMLA Affiliate
SAMLA, Atlanta, GA
November 8-10, 2013

This is a call for abstracts for 20-minute papers that engage with Lacan and early modern literature. Proposals can deal with any aspect of Lacan's work and any genre of early modern literature, and with both English and non-English texts.

Please submit 250-word proposals by June 21 to:
StephenMills@clayton.edu

MMLA 2013 - Session on Canadian Literature (New Deadline)

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:43:37 -0400

This permanent section invites papers on any aspect of Canadian Literature. Proposals related to the conference theme of "art and artifice," are encouraged, although this theme can be broadly construed. The new deadline for abstracts is June 28, 2013.

CFP: Making Meaning with the Work of N. Katherine Hayles, SAMLA, Nov. 8-10, 2013

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:02:08 -0400

This panel seeks to explore a wide range of research that engages the writings of N. Katherine Hayles, SAMLA 85 Critical Plenary Speaker. We invite papers on topics that include but are not limited to the following: theoretical extensions of Hayles’s concepts/approaches; critical applications of her work in analyses of literature, film, digital media, etc.; suggestive combinations of Hayles with other theorists and critics; and explorations of the implications of her ideas for the humanities, the classroom, scholarly publishing, etc. By June 25, 2013, please submit a 300-word abstract and brief bio to Lynn Page Whittaker, University of Georgia, at lynnpw@uga.edu.

SAMLA 85 (Nov. 8-10, 2013) will be held at the Atlanta Marriott Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center. Accepted presenters must join SAMLA (membership information available here: http://samla.memberclicks.net/membership-information) and register for the conference.

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN FOR POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE ON "REVISION: EDITING ACROSS DISCIPLINES"

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:45:52 -0400

We are very happy to announce that REGISTRATION is now open for the FORUM Postgraduate Conference on ReVision: Editing Across Disciplines (15th and 16th July 2013, The University of Edinburgh).

The full programme is available at http://www.forumjournal.org/conference/ and includes:

- keynote lectures from Professor Jeremy Smith (Glasgow), Dr Leon Litvack (Queen's University Belfast) and Boris Gerrets (filmmaker and visual artist).

- workshops with Dr Kenna Olsen (Mount Royal University), Dr Padmini Ray Murray (University of Stirling), Susan Greenberg (University of Roehampton) and playwright and translator Catherine Grosvenor.

- a postgraduate journals round-table

- postgraduate papers on editing in film, visual arts, and literature

If you would like to come please register before 1st July at the University of Edinburgh online shop:
http://www.epay.ed.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&catid=64...

[DEADLINE APPROACHING] CFP Marginalised Mainstream 2013: Fading and Emerging [17 June]

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 02:12:15 -0400

Senate House, University of London
12-13 September 2013

Plenary speakers include:
Dr Kate Macdonald (Ghent University), Professor Nicola Humble (University of Roehampton) and Professor Yvonne Tasker (University of East Anglia)

‘Fading and Emerging: Tracing the Mainstream in Literature and Popular Culture’, the second annual Marginalised Mainstream conference, seeks to explore the issue of fading and emerging in culturally significant popular forms that have been subject to critical marginalisation. How does the mainstream itself foster fading and emerging? How are vanishing and appearance dealt with in popular narratives?

In literature, characters fade into the background or erupt onto the page with sudden violence to affect the plot. The deus ex machina is a staple of thrillers, but where else (and how) is it incorporated? Cinema and photography have offered a unique space to experiment with the concept of fading and vanishing, both literally and figuratively, but also traces and mirages - pressing half images against the psyche invites shadows in and encourages us to see what was never there (think Hitchcock’s Psycho). Metaphors, such as dawn and twilight, shadows and pools of light, abound. Such devices have been used in storytelling since the popular myths of the ancient world. This conference seeks to understand their significance.

We invite submissions from postgraduate students, early career academics and established researchers working in the fields of literature, cultural studies and elsewhere in the humanities to answer these questions and beyond. The aims of this conference strive not only to consider fading and emerging as aspects of narrative but also outside of the fictive world: how and where are trends and fads begun? Why are icons so attractive? What sparks crazes, new styles and popular movements in storytelling, fashion or music? And what is the cause of the more recent trend of remaking and rebooting older films and franchises?

These issues are often the subject of academic marginalisation, which begs the question: what trends can we see in academia? What causes a subject to fall out of favour? And why do so many academics fall prey to the idea that something is only worth studying after it has fully emerged?

We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of the theme of fading and emerging that could include, but are not limited to:

• Fictional traces
• Cross-referentiality/intertextuality
• Revelations/concealment
• Appearances and apparitions
• Vanishing and waning
• Dawn/twilight
• Wallflowers and supporting characters
• Thresholds, closets, windows
• Deus ex machina
• Fade-in, fade-out
• Styles, trends and movements
• Generic inception/genesis
• Fads and crazes
• Failure and success
• The icon – the ‘It’ girl, the ‘It’ film
• Popular re-emergence
• Re-reading, re-viewing and revising
• Remakes and reboots

It goes without saying that writers, texts or topics need not be canonical. In addition, we actively encourage papers discussing writers, texts and visual media that engage with mainstream cultures from around the world.

Panels will follow the format of three 20-minute papers followed by questions.

Abstracts of no more than 350 words are invited by Monday 17th June 2013. Acceptances will be sent out by Monday 24th June 2013. Please email abstracts and a cover sheet including your name, university, contact information, plus a brief biographical paragraph about your academic interests or any enquiries to marginalisedmainstream@gmail.com.

Conference organisers: Brittain Bright, Emma Grundy Haigh and Sam Goodman

Conference website: www.marginalisedmainstream.com

NeMLA Harrisburg, Apr. 3-6, 2014: Is There a Future for the Standard Edition?

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:33:48 -0400

Is there a Future for the Standard Edition?
Session 14120, NeMLA 2014 Convention, Harrisburg PA, April 3-6, 2014

Calling all editors of scholarly ’Works’ editions, and anyone interested in the value and possibilities of such projects under the regime of digitalization and amid shrinking university press budgets. Is the author-based, multi-volume, hard-copy standard edition (becoming) a thing of the past? If so, what(if anything) has been lost? What possibilities exist for perpetuating functions we value on new platforms? What models exist for hybrid paper/digital editions? Are we adequately training tomorrow’s editors?

Brief abstracts by September 30, 2013, describing your proposed contribution to the roundtable and your current interest in scholarly editions.

Artists' Books since c.1970: Making, Teaching, Collecting (10-12 April 2014)

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:05:15 -0400

This session, like this conference, aims to unite the interests of art history with those of contemporary practice. It takes the recent AHRC funded research network ‘Transforming Artist Books’ (February to August 2012) as its point of departure. That network focused its inquiry upon digital transformations and explored the possibilities for artists’ books in the digital realm. What emerged, however, was a gap in our knowledge and understanding of how important collections of artists’ books across the globe have been established, developed and used. Against this background, the session asks how making, teaching and collecting have shifted over the last 40 years and how they intersect and inform each other. In the wake of the 175th anniversary of publicly funded art education in the UK, the pedagogical role of such collections is of particular interest. And the significance of book arts Masters programs and collegiate presses should not be forgotten either. Themes might include but are not limited to:

The artist-publisher and small presses
The book and the body/ performativity in reading
The artist-poet
Book arts pedagogy
The democratic multiple in the age of Amazon and Apple
Collecting artists’ books

It invites proposals from artists, art historians, museum professionals, students and teachers. Through both historical and practice-led perspectives, the session hopes to open up useful new dialogues, raise pertinent questions and establish productive new research relationships.

Deadline for submissions 11 November 2013

Session on Canadian Literature - MMLA

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 20:07:07 -0400

Please send 250-word abstracts and CV by June 15, 2013 to Nathan Jung, najung@uwalumni.com

For more information, please see the conference website: http://www.luc.edu/mmla/

Chair: Nathan Jung, Loyola University Chicago, najung@uwalumni.com

Representations of Gender and Sexuality in John Dos Passos's Writing

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:00:25 -0400

Like his modernist contemporaries, John Dos Passos engages themes of gender and sexuality. But unlike many of his contemporaries, his works may allow for relatively progressive readings of gender relations, understandings and representations of homosexuality, media-centered representations of the sexualized body, etc. Such progressivism may be due to his inherently activist stance during his writing career. However, merely writing during the first half of the 20th century may dictate a certain amount of problematic representation. Whether his works are read as progressive or problematic, studies that center on gender and sexuality in Dos Passos’s writing may help to complicate the general consensus that important male modernists’ relations to these subjects were inherently troubled.

We invite applications for fifteen- to twenty-minute papers that explore representations of gender and/or sexuality in any of Dos Passos’s works. Presentations may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

- social policy, government legislation, and matters of the law in the modernist and late-modernist period
- media, representation, and social images of gender/sexuality as demonstrated in Dos Passos’s fiction or nonfiction writing
- sex, eroticism, otherness
- the body as subject or object
- sexual or gender identity
- feminism and post-feminism: representation and invisibility
- changing images of femininity and masculinity
- queer readings of specific characters, moments, narratives, novels, etc.

Please submit your 250-word abstract, with your name and affiliation, as a Word document to JDPSociety@gmail.com or Victoria.M.Bryan@gmail.com by June 15, 2013.

[UPDATE] Forms of Reading, Forms of Life (SAMLA Nov. 8-10, 2013)

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 10:59:09 -0400

Observing a national decline in literary reading, in 2006 the National Endowment for the Arts instituted the Big Read Program to revivify what it deemed an indispensable, but endangered, civic activity. In 2009, the NEA celebrated new research indicating that, for the first time in twenty-five years, literary reading in the US was on the rise. Yet what grounds are there for such consternation or celebration? Indeed, why a governmental investment in this cultural practice? And, in a digital era, as new forms of textual production and consumption proliferate, why the emphasis on traditionally defined literary reading?
Taking seriously the NEA’s claim that literary reading has “demonstrable social, economic, cultural, and civic implications,” this panel asks what distinctive forms of life such reading might nourish. We are particularly interested in considering questions such as the following: How do literary texts exert pressure on readers’ behavior? How do authors and poets imagine the act of interpretation itself in their creative work? Does digital media entail substantively different ethics of reading? How might the study of literature participate in alleviating social problems, such as poverty, illiteracy, debt, global war, or a diminishing food supply? We invite papers exploring these and related issues in the phenomenology and ethics of reading. Papers may address imaginative and/or theoretical texts from any historical period, national provenance, or (non-)print idiom. All critical orientations are welcome.
SAMLA 2013 (Nov. 8-10) will be held at the Atlanta Marriott Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center.
By June 15, 2013, please submit abstracts of no more than 350 words to Benjamin Sammons, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, at bsammons@email.unc.edu and Benjamin Mangrum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, at bmangrum@email.unc.edu.

Kaleidoscope Volume 5, Issue 2 (2013): "Time" (Deadline 30 June 2013)

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 08:46:32 -0400

Call for Papers

Volume 5, Issue 2 (2013): "Time"

Kaleidoscope is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal (ISSN 1756-8137) edited by postgraduates at Durham University. Working under the auspices of the Institute of Advanced Study (www.dur.ac.uk/ias), Kaleidoscope is designed to foster communication between postgraduates in different disciplines, to promote excellence in interdisciplinary research, and to raise awareness of the IAS as a public forum for interdisciplinary scholarship.

The Institute of Advanced Study publishes a new research theme each year. Submissions relating to the theme are particularly encouraged, from postgraduates and post-doctoral scholars from all disciplines. The theme for the academic year 2012-13 is “Time”.

Examples of subjects invited for submission include, but are not limited to:
•Nature and Geometry of Time
•Narrating Time
•Experiencing Time
•Reconstructing Time
•Time and the Present
•Scaling Time

More information on possible approaches and research interests of the current IAS Fellows can be found at IAS Subthemes website: www.dur.ac.uk/ias/time

Recognising that different disciplines apply different styles and standards of writing, we welcome material of individual or collaborative authorship in a variety of formats, including (but not restricted to):

Full-length articles (7000-10000 words) of original scholarship in your discipline. Articles should be comprehensible to those from outside your field.
•Shorter articles reflecting on how the current theme relates to your discipline, or reflections on how your work is informed by working across disciplines;
•Short book reviews (1000 words);
•Review essays (4000 words).

The final deadline for submissions for the current IAS theme will be 30th June 2013.

Brief guidelines for contributions to Kaleidoscope are provided below, but more detailed guidance can be found on our Submission Guidelines pages.

Manuscripts should be sent as email attachments in MS Word (2003 or 2007) format to editor.kaleidoscope@durham.ac.uk Submissions must be accompanied by a short abstract, and a brief biography outlining your institutional affiliation and research interests (100 words maximum), include any permissions obtained for reproduction rights (e.g. of lengthy quotations, pictures) that fall outside of Fair Dealing (Point 3 of Authors Copyright Agreement).

Only contributions formatted according to the Kaleidoscope template will be accepted. The template follows The Chicago Manual of Style (15th Edition); please refer to our Submission Guidelines pages and to www.chicagomanualofstyle.org for further information.

By submitting a manuscript to Kaleidoscope you acknowledge that the work is original, has not appeared in print and is not under consideration elsewhere and you agree to the terms of Kaleidoscope Author’s Copyright Agreement.

Best wishes,

Kaleidoscope Editorial Team

Cultural Crossings: Production, Consumption, and Reception across the Canada-US Border (cfp deadline: 1 Nov 2013)

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 05:23:38 -0400

Cultural Crossings: Production, Consumption, and Reception across the Canada-US Border

Second international Culture and the Canada-US Border conference
University of Nottingham, 20-22 June 2014

Keynote Speakers: Charles Acland, Danielle Fuller, and DeNel Rehberg Sedo

Call for papers

http://www.kent.ac.uk/ccusb/events/nottingham.html

The Leverhulme Trust-funded Culture and the Canada-US Border international research network is pleased to invite proposals for papers or panels addressing topics related to cultural production, consumption, and reception across the Canada-US border. The 49th parallel has been considered by many Canadian nationalists to symbolize Canada’s cultural independence from the United States, with attendant anxieties about how an “undefended” border might fail to safeguard Canadian culture adequately. This conference seeks to probe the implications for the production, consumption, and reception of literature, film, television, music, theatre, and visual art in relation to the Canada-US border. We encourage analysis of cultural texts, phenomena, and industries both in terms of how they might operate differently in Canada and the United States and the ways in which they might straddle, or ignore, the border altogether. We invite proposals on both contemporary and historical cultural texts and contexts.

Although submissions on any relevant area of interest are welcome, we particularly welcome papers focusing on the following in a cross-border and/or comparative context:

· book histories and publication contexts

· reading cultures and communities

· Hollywood North/runaway film and television production

· Film exhibition and television broadcast

· Performance

· Re-mounts, re-makes, and adaptations

· Musical production, consumption, or reception

· Museum and gallery exhibition

· Aesthetic influences

· Cultural policy

· Economics and their implications for cultural production and consumption

· Fan cultures

· Celebrity culture

· Cultural workers

· National habitus

· Prize culture

· Reading and/or viewing

· Cultural censorship

Please send 300-word proposals for 20-minute papers and a brief bio to CCUSBorder@kent.ac.uk by 1 November 2013. Panel proposals should include individual paper proposals plus a 100-words summary of the panel’s theme.

A limited number of bursaries are available for graduate students delivering papers. Please email CCUSBorder@kent.ac.uk for details.

________________________________________________________________

The CCUSB network, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, grew out of a conference held at the University of Kent, UK, in 2009. Its core members are located at the Universities of Kent and Nottingham, SUNY Buffalo, Algoma, Mt. Royal (Calgary), and Royal Roads (Victoria). Participation in the network’s activities does not require membership. For further details visit: http://www.kent.ac.uk/ccusb

The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction Issue #2

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 20:41:57 -0400

The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction
Deadline for inclusion in our second issue: August 1st, 2013.

We are now soliciting articles for the second issue, and for subsequent issues of the Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction. The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction is a peer-reviewed, open-access, online journal hosted by the University of California at Riverside, affiliated with the UCR Library’s Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Graduate student editors run the Eaton Journal, with scholarly review provided by an interdisciplinary executive board made up of SF scholars, research librarians, and archivists.

The Eaton Journal creates a space for science fiction scholars to share their findings and their experiences within the several archives dedicated to science fiction found throughout the world. The Eaton Journal is also the only journal dedicated to providing a place for archival librarians to discuss the challenges of managing significant science fiction collections and to share their best practices for facilitating as well as conducting archival research in SF.
Articles submitted to the journal should fall under one of three categories:

Scholarly articles with a significant research component: These articles will not simply be notes and speculations regarding material in an archive, but rather will use archival materials to build critical arguments that go beyond the textual and theoretical claims of conventional literary research. While these articles must still be textually and theoretically sound, we hope to provide a venue for research that makes archival evidence its primary focus.

Methodological/Pedagogical articles: Just as the journal will be a showcase for the best archival research in SF, it will also provide a space where SF scholars, librarians, and archivists can develop innovative and incisive strategies for research within the archive, and for integrating that research into the academic genres of publication, presentation, and dissertation. From a pedagogical standpoint, the journal will be a space to discuss methods for developing, transmitting, and assessing archival research skill-sets within the academy, publishing articles that promote skill-sharing both among faculty and between faculty and graduate students.

Articles spotlighting neglected authors, emerging archives, and other research opportunities: The third type of article featured in the journal is that which identifies newly discovered or undeveloped archival resources, or points to authors whose archival traces offer particularly rich opportunities for scholarship. This will also be a space for articles that seek to expand the bounds of the SF archive, exploring new mediums, materials, or discourses as sites for SF scholarship.

For Submission Information and Formatting Guidelines, visit our website at http://eatonjournal.ucr.edu/guidelines.html

Articles submitted for publication in the Eaton Journal should be sent to the editors at: eatonjournal@gmail.com.

Deadline for inclusion in our first issue: August 1st, 2013.

Technology, Rhetoric and Cultural Change: Walter S. Ong, S.J. in the Age of Google, Facebook, and Twitter

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 17:25:32 -0400

Walter Ong was among the foremost theorists of rhetoric and culture in the 20th century. A student of Marshall McLuhan and Perry Miller, his dissertation on the importance of Peter Ramus, a 16th century logician and developer of a deeply influential pedagogy, brought him an international audience. Over the course of his long career, he published several books and hundreds of essays, most arguing that the technology of human communication is reflected, however indirectly, in human consciousness. This interdisciplinary conference will celebrate Ong’s legacy and the tradition of Jesuit scholarship. As enthusiasts of new media daily claim its transformative status—the Tunisians Twittered their way to revolution, Coursera will end classroom teaching, etc.— the conference will take us a step closer to understanding their significance and the role of Walter Ong in our understanding of the emerging world they promise.

The conference will take place on the campus of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington on Friday and Saturday, February 7-8, 2014.

Papers from any field welcomed. Please send abstracts (only) of approximately 200 words to walterongconference@gmail.com by September 1st. Notifications of acceptance will be emailed by October 1st. Please include a contact email address with the abstract. Questions should be addressed to Kathy at the above conference email address.

[UPDATE] Idle/Stasis: Call for Prose, Poetry, Art--deadline extended to June 15

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 23:39:18 -0400

The twinned concepts of idle and stasis have recently been brought to the forefront of political conversations in Canada because of the Idle No More grassroots movement, which is one of the many manifestations of a protest culture encircling the globe. No longer silent in the face of the continuing effects of colonialism and its derivative hierarchical structures, indigenous populations and other citizens are registering their discontent, while fostering networks of solidarity. The notions of action and inaction saturate the very way we have come to conceive of the world today, a world in which productivity and efficiency are valued over health and well- being, technology provides instant access to information, and fast food is available all hours of the day.

Despite this, we see a growing impulse to slow down. The rise of the slow food movement, the popularity of practices like yoga and meditation, and the trends of non-violence and pacifism all attest to this desire for slowness. It is in this context that the 2013 issue of Transverse welcomes submissions that consider “stasis” and “idle” as descriptors and concepts. How are “stasis” and/or “idle” configured as slowness and passivity, or as urgency and action? Is slowness a luxury for the few, or is it a rejection of the capitalization of time? Must slowness be opposed to efficiency?

Transverse welcomes submissions from all academic disciplines of every period— Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the pre-conquest, the colonial time, and everything from Early Modern, Modern, to Postmodern and Contemporary theory and subjects—as well as unaffiliated scholarship, and approaches from the creative arts like photography, graphic arts, and creative writing.

Submissions may address the above questions, the following themes, or other related areas:
• Popular social movements: Idle No More, Occupy, Arab Spring
• Idle & stasis as status quo
• Idle as morbidity, alienation or resignation
• Idle and gender relations
• Idle as sustainable ethics and theories of subjectivity
• Stasis as political, social & moral crisis
• Stasis as balance, reciprocity & equilibrium
• Sumak Kawsay/ buen vivir or good life
• Counter-discourses to capitalist logistics of productivity, production, progress & use value
• Colonial production of idleness and idle subjects
• Non-violence & passivity as resistance
• Slow movements: food, sex (tantric sex), reading, transportation, etc.
• In-between states, slow transition and stagnation
• Stillness in contemplation, meditation, prayer, & mysticism
• Stasis and the stations in monasticism and early Church Fathers
• Etymology & linguistic play: meaning of idle in Old English and Middle English
• Psychoanalysis & the slow process of analysis
• Disease: slow death, AIDS, degeneration
• Queer theory & slow change
• Trauma, memory and the body
• The line between stasis and ec-stasis
• Time capsules as testimonies to cultural stasis

Please send submissions and a brief biography of fewer than 50 words in one Word document to transversejournal@gmail.com by June 1, 2013 for digital and print publication in the autumn of 2013. Please note that video and audio submissions will only appear online, with mention in the print publication.

Prose submissions should be a maximum of 5,000 words, double-spaced, in MLA citation style. Please include a brief abstract of your work and up to 10 keywords along with your prose submission. A maximum of 3 poetic works should be submitted on separate pages in the same document. For further specifications and instructions on how to submit a visual, video, or audio piece, please contact transversejournal@gmail.com or refer to our call for visual submissions. Submissions in English and French welcomed.

Call for Visual Submissions

Transverse, a web and print journal on critical and comparative themes accepts visual art submissions for its fall 2013 issue with the theme of Idle/Stasis. Visual artists at any stage of their artistic development, with or without academic affiliation are called on to consider this year’s theme in the media of their choice.

Unlike cinematic art, still pictures like photography, drawing, painting, printing (and their digital equivalents) have a certain ‘stasis’ inherent in the two-dimensionality of the final output. The attempts and techniques applied to dislocate the limitations of the arrested moment and flat space, which have informed most of the 20th century art, entered a new cycle with the advances of the digital media in the last fifteen years, re-dressing old and bringing up new questions.

Transverse is seeking visual art submissions considering the implications of “idle” and “stasis” on any of the conceptual, technical/technological, or narrative level. Please refer to the general CFP for additional details. The submissions can use any media that can be reproduced on the printed page or viewed in the web format of the journal. Photographic and graphic art works or their sequences are limited to 3 distinct pieces submitted electronically in the following formats: tif, gif, jpg. The minimum resolution required is 300dpi, the maximum size of the submissions 6’’ x 8’’. Submissions with insufficient resolution for print may be considered for the online publication only. Video and audio submissions are limited to 3 distinct pieces of a maximum of 10 minutes each submitted electronically in the following formats: avi, flv, mpeg, mp3, m4a, wma, wav, and wmv. Visual art pieces containing audio or video components will only appear online, with mention in the print.

Please send visual submissions as separate files, as well as a short description including submission titles, the year of their production, and your biography of fewer than 50 words in one Word document to transversejournal@gmail.com by June 1, 2013 for digital and print publication in the autumn of 2013.

War and/in American Periodicals (ALA Symposium, Oct. 10-12)

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:48:39 -0400

War and/in American Periodicals

Since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, American wars have spawned an outpouring of print, as war correspondents have tirelessly competed to report breaking news from the war front; as writers have fought over war’s meaning in newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, periodicals, and other print forms; and as soldiers have found their own voice in diverse formats from military papers like Stars and Stripes during WWI to dissident underground GI papers during the Vietnam War. As spaces of dialogue and dissent, American periodicals have played a formative role in the negotiation of war’s meaning in American culture. This panel seeks 15-20 minute papers addressing any aspect of the relationship between war and American periodicals for the American Literature Association’s Symposium on “War and American Literature” in New Orleans, October 10-12, 2013. Topics could include: seriality and war; the rise of the war correspondent; representations of war by war correspondents; soldier newspapers from the Civil War to Vietnam; trench journalism; fictional representations of war in periodicals; periodicals as spaces for dialogue and dissent about war; anti-war publications; the imagined communities of wartime America; the influence of periodicals on classic war texts (e.g., Century Magazine and Stephen Crane); literary style and war correspondence; war poetry and print culture; etc. By July 8, please email 300-word abstract and C.V. to Jim Berkey, Duke University, james.berkey@duke.edu. For information about the ALA symposium, visit http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/ala2/ALA%20CFP%20New%20Orlean....

Death and Decay (deadline 4th October 2013)

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 04:16:11 -0400

This call for papers invites submissions on the subject of ‘Death and Decay’ for the third edition of HARTS & Minds, an online postgraduate journal for students of the Humanities and Arts, which is due to be published online in Winter 2013-14.

Our first edition and further information can be found at www.harts-minds.co.uk and you can get updates on our journal at www.facebook.com/hartsandminds.

Submissions should adhere to the guidelines available on our website. You can either send us an abstract (approximately 300 words in length) and a completed article (no longer than 6000 words) OR you may provide an abstract (300 words) and a synopsis outlining the structure and argument of your intended article (approximately 1500-2000 words).

You must use the article template available on our website to format your article.

All submissions should be sent with an academic CV to editors@harts-minds.co.uk by Friday 4th October.

Subjects may include but are not limited to the following:

-Rituals and rites of the dead in various cultures
-Burial practices
-Death and dying in literatures
-Visual Death; in art, photography, illustration, in film and television, on stage
-Death personified: the Grim Reaper, Yama & Lord of Naraka, Hel, Hades etc.
-The geography of death; real or mythological
-Disease, decay, apocalypse
-The undead, reincarnation, immortality
-The death of discourse, language, the author, God
-Death as taboo
-War and death
-The future of death in a posthuman world.
-Death of Language
-Moral death
-Death: presence and absence
-Afterlife, textual afterlives.
-Hauntings, the undead, vampires, zombies.
-Eschatology
-The value of Death: what makes a justified or honourable death?
-Dirt and debris, Wrecks and ruins, Flotsam and Jetsam
-Fear of death
-Elegy, Obituary, the Funeral March, Eulogy
-Monuments, Memorials and the Archive
-Suicide, both literal and metaphorical.
-Medical humanities

Please consider that HARTS & Minds is intended as a truly inter-disciplinary journal for the Humanities and Arts and therefore esoteric topics will need to be written with a general academic readership in mind.

[UPDATE] San Joaquin Valley Journal Submission Deadline Extension -- August 1, 2013

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 19:13:13 -0400

The San Joaquin Valley Journal is seeking articles for its fourth issue. SJVJ is an online, peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by the Department of English at California State University, Stanislaus. The annual journal offers a forum for the discussion of literature, critical theory, rhetoric and composition, pedagogy, and issues relevant to teaching in academe. SJVJ is particularly interested in scholarly essays that engage issues and ideas in connection with the literature and culture of the San Joaquin Valley. In view of its regional emphasis, SJVJ also welcomes profiles on San Joaquin Valley writers, creative nonfiction, book reviews, faculty interviews, and commentaries related to the southern portion of California’s Central Valley.

Manuscript guidelines:  Submissions must be written in English. Submissions should be no longer than 25 pages in length and must include a brief abstract (not to exceed 250 words). Submissions must use MLA style. Documents should be double-spaced on 8-1/2 x 11-inch pages with 1-inch margins. Documents should also use 12 pt. Times New Roman font. Journal articles must include parenthetical references, a works cited page, and endnotes.

To facilitate blind review, the author’s name and essay title should appear only on the coversheet. Submissions are evaluated by members of the SJVJ editorial staff. Submissions must include an electronic copy. Send the electronic copy via email to adorsey@csustan.edu. Mail paper submissions to San Joaquin Valley Journal, Department of English, California State University, Stanislaus, Turlock, CA 95382. Submission deadline extension: August 1, 2013.

Authors retain the copyright to work accepted for publication but grant SJVJ unlimited right to reproduce or publish the work in whole or in part.

[UPDATE] DEADLINE EXTENDED 21/6/13: Romantic Lacunae: Silences, Gaps, and Empty Spaces

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 11:49:06 -0400

We invite paper and panel proposals on topics related to silences, disjunctions, and absences in Romantic-era texts, for a one-day conference hosted by the School of English and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen’s University Belfast on 2 August, 2013. The keynote speaker will be Dr Fiona Price, Reader in English Literature at the University of Chichester.

The conference is interested in exploring the power of silences and absences in the literature of the period c.1780-1830. During this time there is significant cultural emphasis on what is not said and why: being silenced and choosing silence touch upon complex issues of power, resistance, and subjection. Generic developments such as the Gothic tradition of the found manuscript and textual fragment could be said to reflect a wider instability surrounding narrative completeness and coherence, while editorial interventions and authorial revisions naturalise practices of erasure and suppression. Recent critical trends make this area particularly fertile ground for study: over the past few decades, criticism has focused on the messy process by which texts come into being, demystifying Romantic notions of authority and textual integrity. The ever-expanding boundaries of canonicity and the recovery of figures operating in literary and social gaps have also made previously suppressed and lost narratives available for critical scrutiny. We are thus seeking papers on lacunae within and between texts, in literary history, and in critical practice.
Proposals of 250 words should be sent to Dr Deborah Russell and Dr Lucy Cogan at romanticlacunae@gmail.com by 21 June, 2013. We would especially welcome papers with a connection to Ireland and/or concepts of identity and community in ‘four nations’ Romanticism.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):
• Muteness: voluntary and involuntary silences
• Memory and forgetting
• Lost traditions and lost texts
• Fragments and incomplete narratives
• Absences and loss or mourning
• Editorial deletions and/or alterations
• Erasure from history and historiographical narratives
• Displacement
• Suppressed narratives of class, race, or gender
• The unsaid and the unsayable
• Censorship and self-censorship
• Digital Humanities and missing text(s)

Reconstruction: Studies in Contempory Culture (Open Submissions)

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 18:29:03 -0400

Open Issues

Contact: Reconstruction Submissions Editor

We are continually accepting submissions for upcoming Open Issues, and can promise a prompt reply.

Submissions may be created from a variety of perspectives, including, but not limited to: geography, ethnography, cultural studies, folklore, architecture, history, sociology, linguistics, psychology, communications, music, philosophy, political science, semiotics, theology, art history, queer theory, literature, criminology, urban planning, gender studies, education, graphic design, etc. Both theoretical and empirical approaches are welcomed.

Return to Top»

Guest Editor of Upcoming Themed Issue

Contact: Reconstruction Managing Editor

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture is always interested in proposals for future Themed Issues. If you are interested in proposing a Themed Issue, please review our FAQ for Prospective Guest Editors and contact the Reconstruction Managing Editor for further information.

[UPDATE] MMLA 2013: Design and the Digital Humanities (deadline: June 7)

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 12:03:29 -0400

DEADLINE EXTENDED
With this year’s MMLA conference theme of “Art & Artifice,” the new Permanent Section on Digital Humanities will explore issues of, experiments with, and provocations on design.

Digital humanities (DH) is often equated with tool-oriented, procedural tasks like text analysis and data gathering. For example, the recent MLA open access publication Literary Studies in the Digital Age, focuses on textual databases, mining, analysis, and modeling. However, Johanna Drucker, Anne Burdick, Bethany Nowviskie, Tara McPherson, and others have argued that interface and systems design, visual narrative, and graphical display are not peripheral concerns, but rather important “intellectual methods” (Burdick et al. 2012). Likewise, DH projects and publications often segment (content first, design last) and/or outsource (hire a firm, select a template) the design process, overlooking the powerful and important dialectic of design and argument, at times to the great detriment of the project itself. In an effort to further the conversation, we invite papers related to any aspect of design and the digital humanities. Possible topics/questions may include, but are certainly not limited to:

design of interactive fiction, hypertext fiction, and electronic literature
games and virtual spaces
hybrid digital/analog fabrication practices and the ethos of hacking, making, and crafting that surrounds them
tensions between original designs and prefabricated templates and visualizations
the relationship between content and design in a scholarly edition, web archive, course website, or other digital content management project
design and affect, design and imagination
the tendency of DH project groups to separate designers and programmers on a team; tendency to divide design concerns from “technical” concerns
design standards, web standards, responsive & participatory design, and issues of accessibility of online publications and projects
skeuomorphism vs. born-digital design?
design and code as language art, code poetry, etc.?

Please send 250-word abstracts by JUNE 7 to both Josh Honn (Northwestern University, josh.honn@gmail.com) and Rachael Sullivan (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, sullivan.rachael@gmail.com).

The 55th Annual MMLA Convention will be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the Hilton Milwaukee City Center from November 7-10, 2013.

RSA 2014 - Worldly wisdom: Early Modern Handbooks in Theory and Practice

Fri, 31 May 2013 17:49:18 -0400

Shakespeare’s Iago frowns on “bookish theoric” as “mere prattle without practice” – the formal display of knowledge without the substance of experience. But a great deal of early modern book-learning would in fact have fallen under the heading of “practick,” drawn from experience and aimed at achieving practical results. An extraordinary flourishing of advice literature accompanied the rise of print in England: from conduct books and letter-writing manuals, to vernacular arithmetics and handbooks on weights and measures, to guidelines on managing health, hygiene, and household.

This panel invites papers on any aspect of practical literature, broadly construed. We are especially interested in new and experimental approaches to these complex and often sophisticated texts, as well as papers that consider the methodological and theoretical issues they raise. For example, how might we approach them as literary and cultural objects, and not just historical evidence? What challenges do they pose to us as readers, or to the category and canon of “literature” as we usually understand it? How might formal and rhetorical considerations give us new perspective on audience and circulation? How might such approaches be put in contact with book history and social history?

We welcome approaches from scholars of the history of science and technology, history of art, literature, and other disciplines, and interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

-Theorick and Practick, and the conflict and continuity between theoretical and practical knowledge

-The relationship between kinds of knowledge and particular texual forms, such as letters, sermons, or epitomes

-Print, manuscript, and other material practices

-Communities of readers and expert communities

-Early modern forms of expertise and “technology transfer”

-Self-advice and mnemonics: in diaries, autobiography, account-books, and annotations

-Questions of textual originality and unoriginality; authorship

-Methods of reading, copying, annotation, and experimentation

Please send a 150-word abstract and a brief CV to Jessica Rosenberg (jessicar@sas.upenn.edu) and Laura Kolb (lkolb@uchicago.edu) by June 8 for consideration.

Is there a Future for the Standard Edition?

Thu, 30 May 2013 20:05:06 -0400

Session 14120, NeMLA 2014 Convention, Harrisburg PA, April 3-6, 2014

Brief abstracts by September 30, 2013, describing your proposed contribution to the roundtable and your current interest in scholarly editions.

Textual Artifacts: Francophone Literatures and the Museum, NeMLA, Harrisburg, Apr. 3-6th, 2014 sub. deadline Sept. 30, 2013

Wed, 29 May 2013 05:53:21 -0400

This panel will examine how Francophone literary works represent museums or occupy them as artifacts on display. While wall text and written documents have always played a key role in exhibits, various genres of literature are also the object of their own museums. Moreover, contemporary writers from Bessora (53 cm, 1999) to Nicole Brossard (Musée de l’os et de l’eau, 2008) have taken an interest in the text as a form of discursive museum in its own right.

Papers that address the intersections between textual discourses and museum spaces in order to reinvent (post)colonial history or question traditional ‘museology’ in contemporary cultural contexts are welcome. They may also highlight the agency of Francophone writers and museum curators who reshape aesthetic, ethical, political, or epistemological issues through their work. Contributions are encouraged on various genres (the novel, la bande dessinée, book art, etc.) and areas of expertise in museum studies (collection, preservation, curation, performance art).

Please submit a 250-300 word abstract in English or French to Alisa Belanger: alisa.belanger@rutgers.edu.

Deadline: September 30, 2013

Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable. http://www.nemla.org/convention/2014/cfp.html

[UPDATE] New Crops, Old Fields - (Re)Imagining Irish Folklore

Mon, 27 May 2013 09:49:05 -0400

Keynote Speakers :
Prof. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (University of Notre-Dame)
Prof. Harry White (University College Dublin)
Prof. Luke Gibbons (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)

From our homes to our houses of government, from our schoolyards to our stadia, from our galleries to our gable walls, folklore is being re-imagined in all aspects of everyday life in Ireland. Today, with globalised, media-centric culture, the folk traditions take on new lives in music, literature, theatre, radio, film and television, advertising and tourist industries. The ancient stories and characters still find a place within the new multicultural Ireland and their depiction continues to evolve. Irish folklore has been made new again, in a regenerating of the tradition, where the old and the new, the oral, the textual and the visual intermingle.
This conference aims at exploring the rich traditions of Irish folklore, and looking at the various ways it is being, has been or indeed was, re-purposed and reinvented. We hope to bring together researchers at various stages of their careers, both professional and postgraduate, working on any and every aspect of the folklore of Ireland, its reappropriation and dissemination up to the present day or indeed the reuse of traditions. We welcome proposals from researchers in the fields of Agriculture, Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture, Dance, Drama, Ecology, Film Studies, Folklore, Geography, History, History of Art, Languages, Literature, Media Studies, Music, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology and Theology, Tourism Studies.

Topics may include (but are not limited to) the reuse of legends,
myths, beliefs, folktales, songs, rhymes and riddles, music, dance, sayings and proverbs, customs, oral history, etc in:

- the Visual Arts (paintings, sculptures, dance, etc) and iconography
- Film, Television and Radio
- Advertising, tourism, the diaspora and folklore around the world
- Politics
- Literature, in English or as Gaeilge
- Children's Literature
- Food and drink
- Music
- Theatre and performance
- comparative approaches of the reuse of Irish folklore and international folklore
- urban folklore

There will also be performances from Irish musicians and storytellers.

Please submit proposals of 300 words and a short biography to newcrops@qub.ac.uk by 15th June 2013.

From God's eye to the Big Brother's room. Geographies of espionage. ONLINE: May 2014

Sun, 26 May 2013 17:13:36 -0400

The function of the eye that spies on us all apparently has never been benevolent, be it a tangible eye, an intangible, or a technological one. From the stern God of the Old Testament — who tracked down the culprits and punished them — to the evolution of modern dystopias, the eye has become increasingly implacable, ubiquitous, and immediate in its expressions, so that there is no time, nor space, left for a postponed punishment. If we want to find a good eye, a fair spy, it is necessary to shift to the side of the observer, of the hero (in this case, with no anti prefix), who sacrifices his/her safety for a larger good, with no doubts or hesitations. The key to the requalification of the role of the spy apparently lies in the transformation from a passive to an active and cognizant activity.
The crucial role of the Government is quite obvious. On the one hand, its eye observes the countless trifles of our lives, with the most modern means, authoritatively replacing the role of the ancient consciense. On the other hand, the Government enlists and instructs operation observators, assimilating the passage from active to passive. However, it also decides about later inclusions or exclusions at its own will, to the extent that it feeds — apparently unconsciously — government monsters within the Government, who are instigated by unsettling puppet masters that are never punished or tracked down. The recurring abdication of public authority over its functions, as well as its interests in presumably illegal private business, are some of the features that characterize the modern literary dystopia, which can never do without observing, and, why not, listening. Consequently, the ancient borderlines within fiction — utopias and dystopias, noirs, thrillers, spy-stories — become increasingly blurred, as they try to keep up with an alluvial and dystopian reality.
Our aim is to fuel a debate on a specific aspect of this story, namely on the mortgage on the space that comes from the spying activity. Indeed, in our collective imagination the spy is often associated to a certain mobility, to a certain seminomadic feature which is often functional to his/her fictional representation. However, we mean to focus on the places where spies carry out their missions, on the territoriality of their fields of action, on their national and geographical belonging, on the rooms where they carry out their activities, or which are the object of their operations, up to the modern requalification of the spaces that used to be the object of the unfaithful gaze and are now used to preserve the fruits — as well as the tools — of such activities.
The contributions of the eleventh issue of Other Modernities will exchange views on such a scenario.
Within this context, we welcome proposals focusing on the following topics:
• The spy's nationality and its antagonistic relationship with its own territory, as well as with foreign countries;
• Museum and archival realities of past espionage;
• Precedence relationships between fiction and reality in specific geopolitics, whenever it is possible to find any;
• The development of such themes in specific political, ethnic, religious, or gender realities;
• The gossip "genre" in newsmagazines, cinema, television, and literature;
• The Big Brother phenomenon, and, more generally, the success of the candid camera format;
• The lives of others, the other's gaze: privacy and social control in the contemporary world.

Should potential contributors submit other proposals on the topic, they will be taken into consideration by the Scientific Committee, with a view to enriching the investigation of the current issue of the review with the most articulated and original suggestions.
Abstracts, alongside a list of bibliographical references (between 10 and 20 lines long) and a short CV, should be submitted to the email address amonline@unimi.it no later than 10th September 2013.
Acceptance of contributions will be notified by 15th September 2013.
The deadline for submission of papers is 15th January 2014.
The issue will be published by late May 2014.
We also welcome book reviews and interviews to authors and scholars who investigate the aforementioned topics.
Contributors are free to contact the editors to discuss and clarify the objectives of their proposals, with a view to making the issue as homogeneous as possible also from a methodological point of view. The editors (Irina Bajini and Paolo Caponi) can be contacted via the Editorial Secretary (amonline@unimi.it).

Friendly Fire: Renaissance Humanists’ Critiques of Renaissance Humanism

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:33:10 -0400

The clarion call of “Humanities Under Attack!” is by now an academic commonplace. Much of the aggression is seen as stemming from external forces such as shrinking budgets, hostile legislature, and disappearing enrollments. However, there is also a persistent strain of self-critique among scholars working in the humanities, which challenges the intellectual system’s perceived exclusivity and alleged inability to speak to what is considered valuable in higher education today. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine assert that the modern fields of the humanities carry the elitist baggage of their Renaissance humanist forebears. This panel recognizes that the tendency to question the inculcated virtues of humanism has always been endemic to our profession: this critical gaze is itself a product of a humanist pedagogy that has historically trained individuals to read against the grain.

Submissions should focus on how Renaissance humanists resisted the educational system that trained them. What were their grounds of contention? How did artists, chroniclers, musicians, philosophers, poets, and prose writers frame their opposition? What were the cultural, epistemological, hermeneutic, and material consequences of their antagonistic analyses? How do these early modern critiques of humanism anticipate current concerns about the humanities? Proposals from all fields are welcome.

Please send an abstract of 150 words and a one-page C.V. to Kat Lecky at klecky@astate.edu by 1 June 2013.

[UPDATE] Early Modern Paratexts 26th July - Programme ready

Wed, 22 May 2013 03:27:17 -0400

Playbooks, women's collections of poetry, music manuals, playing cards, Shakespeare, Spenser, Caxton and Ovid are just some of the topics that will be discussed at Early Modern Paratexts 2013.

The full programme is now available at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/events/2013/1489.html.

Registration is open and there are postgraduate bursaries available.

Please contact earlymodernparatexts2013@gmail.com with any queries.

SHARP @ RSA 2014 - "Fragments and Gatherings"

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:30:57 -0400

Call for Papers: SHARP @ RSA 2014

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) will sponsor a series of panels at the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meeting in New York City, 27-29 March 2014. SHARP @ RSA brings together scholars working on any aspect of the creation, dissemination, and reception of manuscript and print and their digital mediation.

For the 2014 conference, we are soliciting papers that address the issues of fragmentation and gathering, broadly conceived, in early modern English and/or Continental books and manuscripts. We invite submissions that consider one or more of the following topics:

1) Fragments: How does the production and survival of texts as discrete material objects shape our understanding and use of them? We might think of fragments in terms of how texts were made (pieces of type, leaves of paper) or in terms of how they are experienced today (surviving fragments).

2) Gatherings: How does the grouping of discrete objects into collections of more or less coherence shape our understanding and use of textual objects? Gathering might take the form of the minute to large scale (quires of paper, sammelband, libraries).

3) Fragments and Gatherings: How do fragments turn into gatherings? When do gatherings break down into fragments? What sort of study of book history and material textuality is engendered by these moves?

Please send a 150-word abstract and a one-page CV to Adam Hooks (adam-hooks@uiowa.edu) and Sarah Werner (swerner@folger.edu) by June 7th (note that this is earlier than the RSA’s own deadline).

All participants must be current members of both RSA and SHARP.

For details of RSA 2014, see http://www.rsa.org/?page=2014NewYork

For more information on SHARP, see http://www.sharpweb.org/