cultural studies and historical approaches

From vampires to zombies, uncanny doubles to the demonically possessed, gothic tropes have played a significant role in shaping narratives of addiction in American culture. More recently, news stories have framed the opioid crisis and its impact on homeless populations in cities like Boston and Philadelphia as a “zombie apocalypse.” Such tropes can dehumanize already stigmatized populations, yet the gothic remains a mode uniquely suited for exploring concepts of addiction and the lived experiences of individuals, families, and communities affected by the condition.

Call for Papers: Victorians. A Journal of Culture and Literature welcomes submissions of new work for 2024, Summer and Winter numbers. 2024 marks the bicentenary of a number of literary, intellectual, and cultural events associated with 1824, including:

Science: Michael Faraday and the Royal Society

Periodicals: founding of Jeremy Bentham’s Westminster Review

Education: Manchester Mechanics’ Institute (preceded by Edinburgh, 1821 and Liverpool, Glasgow, and London in 1823)

Music: Beethoven’s 9th Symphony

Social Reform: Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals established 

Subtitled “Surplus Data,” the Winter 2022 issue of Critical Inquiry began by proclaiming that, “It is no longer enough to say that data is big. Data is now in a state of surplus” (Halprin et al. 197). As private and state actors rush to generate ever more surplus surveillance data about consumer-citizens and workers across domains of life, literary scholars are compelled to question how this data is made meaningful and by whom. After all, data never speaks for itself; it must be assigned value and transformed into narratives. These surveillance stories often reify “identities of suspicion” (Monahan), marking marginalized people as themselves surplus subjects.

With the success of two panel sessions at the 2023 NeMLA Convention, we are happy to propose a “sequel” session on the theme of “Tolkien’s Medievalism in Ruins” in 2024. For all that may be said about the 2023 panels, one thing is certain: The panelists highlighted the important roles of relics and ruins within Tolkien’s essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings.

2024 CONFERENCE THEME: BUILDING ALLIANCES
 

(A)rchival endeavors should not be about documenting the past, nor even about imagining the future…but about building a liberatory now. 

-Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (2021, 13)

CFP: JEWISH STUDIES UNIT
Jewish Interfaith, Intercultural, and Intersectional Engagements
Unit Chairs: Roberta Sabbath, University of Nevada
                     Alexander Marcus, University of Pennsylvania

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on African American Literature for our 53rd annual conference in Atlanta, March 21-23, 2024.

For this area, we are particularly interested in proposals that relate African American literature to the conference theme of “Transformations” from academics from a wide range of areas across literary studies, creative writing, rhetoric, composition, technical communication, linguistics, and film.

We would like to invite proposals for chapters for a forthcoming edited collection on animals, fashion, and colonialism. Our project investigates the way that colonialism was inscribed on the female body through animal fashions in the long nineteenth century and beyond. Contributions are welcome from a wide variety of fields, with interdisciplinary approaches preferred. 

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:  

CFP: Irish Women’s Genre Fiction / Special Issue of _LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory_

Deadline for abstract submissions: Nov 3, 2023

Deadline for paper submissions: May 15, 2024

This year, the Annual Meeting of the South Central Society for Eighteenth Century Studies will be held in one of the most thought-provoking cities in contemporary America: Portland, Oregon. The meeting will be held on Friday, March 1, and Saturday, March 2, 2024. While papers on all aspects of the long eighteenth century are welcome, the theme of the conference will be "The Book and the City."

‘Music, Domesticity, and British Identity’ – Call for Articles (deadline 20 October 2023), Nineteenth-Century Music Review

Dear all,

I am delighted to announce the call for articles for ‘Music, Domesticity, and British Identity’, a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review<https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nineteenth-century-music-review> (General Editor: Prof. Bennett Zon).

The call is available here: <https://musicdomesticbritain19.hcommons.org/sample-page/>

CFP ACLA2024: Seminar "The Evolution of Interactivity in Storytelling"

American Comparative Literature Association

Montreal, Canada, March 14-17, 2024

Abstract deadline: September 30, 2023

The ongoing evolution of interactivity in novels, films, games, and digital media forms a continual dialogue between human creativity and technological innovation.  Interactivity has long been a cornerstone in storytelling, engendering a dynamic relationship between creators, writers, readers, players, and interactors.

Literary Theory at CEA 2024

deadline for submissions: 

November 1, 2023

full name / name of organization: 

College English Association (CEA)

contact email: 

conaway@usi.edu

Call for Papers, Literary Theory at CEA 2024

March 21-23 | Atlanta, Georgia

The Westin Buckhead Atlanta

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on Literary Theory for our 53rd annual conference. Submit your proposal at www.cea-web.org.

Zines are extremely versatile and shapeshift across various historical and cultural contexts. The term covers a wide range of objects with different aesthetic and material qualities as well as contexts of production and reception: Zines accommodate the collective concerns of fans and activists (zintivism) and the personal voice of the diarist and letter writer. Since the rise of digital media, zines and their aesthetics have become portable: Digitised and digital zines exist alongside blogs, social media, podcasts, and substacks, which seem to exhibit zine-y tendencies, while digital infrastructures have changed the ways that print zines are produced, distributed, and archived.