category: ecocriticism and environmental studies

[UPDATE - deadline extended] 5th Annual Louisiana Studies Conference, September 20-21, 2013

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:27:39 -0400

The 5th Annual Louisiana Studies Conference will be held September 20-21, 2013 at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The Conference Committee is now accepting presentation proposals for the upcoming conference. The theme of this year’s conference is “Preserving Louisiana.”

This interdisciplinary conference will be accepting proposals from the following disciplines: American studies, anthropology, architecture, archival studies, communications, craft, creative writing, criminal justice, cultural studies, cultural tourism, dance, design, English and literary studies, environmental studies, ethnic studies, fashion design, film studies, fine arts, folklore, gender studies, geography, heritage resources, history, interior design, journalism, linguistics, museum studies, musicology, music performance, philosophy, photography, political science, preservation studies, psychology, queer studies, religious studies, Romance languages, social work, sociology, theatre, and vernacular architecture.

Although we are especially interested in proposals that deal with Preserving Louisiana, all papers, creative writing, and short performances (dance, music, or theatric) that address ANY aspect of Louisiana studies are welcome. Proposals are being solicited for fifteen minute presentations from scholars at all career stages as well as graduate students. Creative work (creative non-fiction, short fiction, and poetry) is welcome. Undergraduates are invited to submit, provided they are working with the guidance of a trained scholar. Proposals for panels and roundtable discussions are welcome. Registration for Conference attendees will be $40.

Abstracts (300 words max.) for scholarly proposals, creative writing, films, and short performances (dance, music, or theatric) should be sent as e-mail attachments to Dr. Shane Rasmussen, rasmussens@nsula.edu. Presentations should run no longer than 15 minutes. Briefly detail the audio / visual tools (laptop, projection screen, data projector, DVD or VCR player, etc.) or space (the stage in the Magale Recital Hall will be provided for short performances) your presentation will require, if any. Please include a separate cover page with your name, affiliation, mailing and e-mail address, and the title of your presentation. E-mails should be entitled: Louisiana Studies Conference Submission. We will send an e-mail acknowledgement of having received each abstract within one week of having received it. If you do not receive an acknowledgment please resend your submission as we may not have received it. The deadline for submissions is July 15. Accepted presenters will be notified via e-mail by July 31, 2013.

Read broadly, consider the following possibilities for presentation topics relating to Preserving Louisiana. (Note: The following list of suggestions is not meant to be comprehensive.)

Archaeology
Architecture (including Vernacular Architecture)
Archives
Art
Bridges and Structures
Built Environments
Cemeteries and Gravestones
Churches
Conservation
Crafts
Cultural Heritage
Cultural Landscapes
Curation
Dancehalls
Disaster Preparedness and Recovery
Farming and Agricultural Practices
Film
Folk Industries
Folk Traditions
Folklife Apprenticeships
Gardens and Arboretums
Historical Landmarks and Sites
Historical Significance
History
Industrial Sites (cotton gins, fisheries, sugar houses)
Language Preservation
Libraries
Main Streets
Material Culture
Monuments
Murals
Museums
Native American Sacred Spaces
Oral History
Photography
Plantations
Preservation and Heritage Advocacy
Preservation and Heritage Education
Public Art
Public Spaces
Roadside Attractions
Rural Life
Sculptures
Sense of Place
Signs
State and National Parks
Theaters
Threats to Preservation

A selection of scholarly and creative work presented at the conference will be solicited for publication in Louisiana Folklife, a peer reviewed academic journal produced by the Louisiana Folklife Center, Northwestern State University, General Editor, Dr. Shane Rasmussen.

Additional information is available on the website for the Louisiana Folklife Center at Northwestern State University: http://louisianafolklife.nsula.edu/.

Dr. Lisa Abney, Provost, Vice President for Student and Academic Affairs, and Professor of English, Northwestern State University (Conference Co-chair)

Dr. Shane Rasmussen, Director of the Louisiana Folklife Center and Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern State University (Conference Co-chair)

The Conference is co-sponsored by the Folklife Society of Louisiana, the Louisiana Folklife Center, and the NSU College of Arts, Letters, Graduate Studies and Research.

The Films of Robert Rodriguez

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:27:02 -0400

Call For Papers: The Films of Robert Rodriguez

POST SCRIPT: Essays in Film and the Humanities invites submissions for a special issue on the Films of Robert Rodriguez.

The issue will be guest edited by Professor Christopher González (Texas A&M University-Commerce).

Texas-based director Robert Rodriguez is arguably one of the most important Latino filmmaker of his time; his enterprising approach has now taken him into other forms of visual media, such as his El Ray television network and his latest “Project Green Screen” venture with the cell phone giant, BlackBerry. This special issue seeks to continue the exploration of this significant filmmaker first begun by Charles Ramírez Berg in his Latino Images in Film, and continued most recently by Frederick Luis Aldama’s Robert Rodriguez and the Cinema of Possibilities, to be published later this year. Submissions are open to a variety of theoretical approaches.

Post Script encourages original manuscripts of no more than 7,000 words in this area from scholars and academics as well as filmmakers. Essays will be subject to peer review. The guest editor invites submissions on the following topics or related topics:

• The impact of Rodriguez’s first feature film, El Mariachi, made for only $7,000
• Films such as The Faculty, where Rodriguez served as director only
• Directorial collaborations, such as Sin City, where he worked alongside Frank Miller
• Larger filmic canvases like the Spy Kids and Machete franchises, and the Mexico Trilogy
• Shorter films such as “Bedhead,” “The Black Mamba,” and “The Misbehavers”
• The “Ten Minute Film School” tutorials Rodriguez regularly features on his films’ DVDs
• Rodriguez’s filmmaking partnership with Quentin Tarantino, from cameos in Desperado, and Planet Terror, to more substantive collaborations in From Dusk Till Dawn and Grindhouse
• An exploration of Rodriguez’s filmmaking philosophy and technique, the speed at which he shoots; the economy of his productions; etc.
• The formal elements of Rodriguez’s films, including visual, sound, dialogue, and so on
• The politics of films like Machete, Planet Terror, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico
• Rodriguez’s penchant for using many of the same actors across his films; or example, Danny Trejo’s rise as voiceless villain in Desperado to brown superhero in Machete
• Rodriguez’s oft-criticized representation of women.
• An exploration of how Rodriguez’s films often engage in a Chuck Jones- or Tex Avery-style cartoon sensibility
• The adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City
• Rodriguez’s subversive use of stereotypes and cultural clichés
• Substantive interviews
• Book reviews (up to 1,000 words)

Please note that Post Script does not reprint previously published material.

Submit manuscripts via a virus-free attachment, with author identification on a separate page and not in the headers, by e-mail to guest editor Christopher González at the address below by November 1, 2013. Manuscripts must be in English and must conform to the MLA Style Manual, 3rd edition.

Professor Christopher González
Department of Literature and Languages
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Email: Chris.Gonzalez@tamuc.edu

For questions about Post Script not related to this special issue, contact the general editor:
Professor Gerald Duchovnay Gerald.Duchovnay@tamuc.edu

[UPDATE] SAMLA 2013: (Con)Textual Networks and the Globalized Caribbean (due June 10)

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:39:01 -0400

2013 SAMLA CONFERENCE, NOV 8-10, ATLANTA

SPECIAL SESSION: "(Con)Textual Networks and the Globalized Caribbean"

We often think of globalization as a contemporary phenomenon, characterized by the way high-speed technologies have changed everything from market dynamics to social relations. Many scholars, however, see the current phase of globalization as part of an historical process beginning as early as the sixteenth century. The Caribbean has, indeed, been a transnational site from the time of its original European colonization, soon followed by the importation of coerced labor from Africa, South Asia, and China. Today, the region remains populated by a wide variety of ethnic groups, highly trafficked by tourists from around the world, and economically tied to foreign currencies and markets. Additionally, high rates of migration from the Caribbean to North America and Europe have created an immense Caribbean diaspora that retains cultural and economic ties to the region, facilitated in part by new technologies and alliances.

Images of the Caribbean have thus been documented, constructed, and circulated globally from the rise of print culture to the dawn of the digital age. This panel seeks proposals engaging any aspect of the conference theme, “Cultures, Contexts, Images, Texts: Making Meaning in Print, Digital, and Networked Worlds,” in relation to literature and/or other media from any part of the Anglophone Caribbean.

Some possible topics include:

The “digital humanities” and Caribbean studies
Visual images of the Caribbean
Cartographic representations of the Caribbean
Caribbean service economies—tourism, textiles and “free trade” zones, data mining, banking, etc.
Regionalism, Nationalism, Transnationalism
Marketing the Caribbean/the Caribbean market
Intra-Caribbean exchange and migration
Local and regional grassroots activist networks in the Caribbean
Caribbean diasporas—cultural, economic, and/or social networks

Please submit an abstract of 200-300 words and a brief bio (not CV) of <100 words, in Word or PDF, to Kristine A. Wilson (wilson67@purdue.edu). DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JUNE 10, 2013.

Apollon eJournal - Undergraduate Submissions deadline 6/15/2013

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:43:39 -0400

Check the website, apollonejournal.org, for submission details on publication, or for an application to work with us

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Apollon invites undergraduate students to get published in, review submissions for, or help edit a the third issue of our peer-reviewed eJournal, Apollon. By publishing superior examples of undergraduate academic work, Apollon highlights the importance of undergraduate research in the humanities. Apollon welcomes submissions that feature image, text, sound, and a variety of presentation platforms in the process of showcasing the many species of undergraduate research.

ABOUT THE PROJECT
Apollon, an undergraduate humanities eJournal, is a peer-reviewed publication for undergraduate humanities majors. Apollon features undergraduate research developed in humanities courses, and thus emphasizes faculty-student collaborations beyond the classroom. We invite interested students to join us by contributing leadership or original work to Apollon. Our student team participates at all levels of this ongoing project (design, review, and publication) to offer their peers a real outlet for intellectual work in the humanities. For more information you can go to the program website, www.apollonejournal.org, talk to your professors, or contact the Faculty Director, Jason Cohen, at (859) 985-3765 or cohenj@berea.edu.

CFP: Aloha at Risk: Education in Hawaii (Edited Collection)

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:51:27 -0400

Since the release of “A Nation At Risk” in 1983, public education has been subjected to increased scrutiny from political officials, parents, and concerned citizens. In recent years, such scrutiny has given way to calls for comprehensive education reform. Both the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and Race to the Top program, respectively inaugurated under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, focus on increasing standards for public schools throughout the United States, while more local initiatives like private school voucher systems and parent “trigger” laws attempt to increase learning opportunities for children by maximizing parental choice and administrative participation.

Yet, these reforms—or 'deforms' as they're called by opponents—have been condemned for being undemocratic, corporatist, and overly punitive. NCLB, for example, has been said to subsume diverse groups of children under reductionist statistical metrics, failing to account for demographic and developmental variances. RTTT continued this trend, according to critics, and added pressure for local school districts to implement costly teacher evaluation protocols based largely on standardized achievement tests, rather than holistic measures of learning growth and professional practice. In an ironic display of political harmony, small-government 'conservatives' and labor-minded 'liberals' alike have attacked national education reforms, the former for impugning states' rights and the latter for undermining collective bargaining.

Hawaii, considered by some political pundits to be the most labor-friendly state in the nation, has been on the frontlines of the battle over public education. One year after receiving an RTTT grant award in 2010, the state was placed on “high risk” status by the U.S. Department of Education for failing to implement reforms quickly enough and prolonging a regressive contract dispute with the Hawaii State Teachers Association. Education reforms are further complicated by events from Hawaii's historical trajectory, including settler colonialism, imperial overthrow of native governance, suppression of indigenous culture, and plantation economics, each of which inform the state's current sociopolitical structure and discursive condition.

This interdisciplinary essay collection seeks to engage the theme of “education in Hawaii” from a critical vantage point. Submissions will be accepted for each of the book's four sections: “Pedagogy of Aloha” (critical pedagogical studies); “Decolonizing Aloha” (colonialism in/and the classroom); “Re/Deforming Aloha” (general education theory, including social, political, and philosophical analysis); and “Teaching Aloha” (classroom stories). Potential topics might include:

- How do socioeconomic and ethnic inequality affect Hawaii's classrooms and education politics?

- To what extent does money drive education reform in Hawaii? Do reforms (re)produce corporate infrastructure and economic division, rather than quality learning experiences?

- How does Hawaii's history, including settler colonialism and plantation development, impact the present state and future direction of the state's education system?

- In what ways are native or marginalized knowledge(s) suppressed by standards-based education reforms? What pedagogical techniques might be used to advance such knowledge(s)?

- What progressive teaching modalities (i.e. feminist composition, queer- and eco-pedagogy, or ethnomathematics) might be employed to address Hawaii's diverse student populations?

Educator and author Doug Robertson will serve as editor for this collection. Essays should be approximately 4,000 to 8,000 words in length and employ Chicago Manual of Style formatting (using endnotes). Submissions should be sent to editors@interstitialjournal.com. Initial inquiries are welcome. Deadline for submissions is December 31, 2013.

(Re)thinking Global Connectedness: Critical Perspectives on Globalization

Wed, 15 May 2013 02:24:26 -0400

Proposals Due: 15 September 2013
Conference Dates: 26-28 January 2014
Location: Doha, Qatar

The Liberal Arts Program at Texas A&M University at Qatar is pleased to announce the Call for Proposals for its Second Annual Liberal Arts International Conference. Following the success of last year’s Ethical Engagement with Globalization, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, this second annual conference will explore the impacts of globalization from a variety of disciplinary lenses.

How has globalization transformed us individually and collectively? How is globalization shaping notions of ethics? Is globalization merely a shrinking of the world or is it transforming human experience? What challenges does globalization pose to understandings of the self and the other? How do we sustain a globalized world in terms of food, energy, and education? Are we already living in a post-globalized world?

We welcome submissions from across the spectrum of academic fields, including composition and rhetoric, linguistic, politics, history, technology, language studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, philosophy, ethics, law, religion, and cultural studies. We especially encourage contributions from PhD students and scholars working in non-western and/or underrepresented regions.

Possible Conference Panels and Discussions:
Conceptualizing Globalization
Connections: Globalization and Technology
(Re)Thinking Ethics in a Globalized World
Linguistic Perspectives on Globalization
Education in a Globalized World
Historical Perspectives on Globalization
Globalization: Comparative East-West Perspectives
Global Movements: Environment, Peace, Violence
Legal Concerns of a Bordered/Borderless World
Gendering Globalization

The conference can provide substantial travel bursaries for international participants who need funding.Submission of individual papers and complete panel proposals on these or other related themes are welcome. Select papers will be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed volume or a special issue of an international journal.

In order to be considered, please submit a panel proposal or individual paper proposal to include author(s) names, institution affiliation, email address, and an abstract of 250 words with 5 keywords by September 15, 2013 to LAIC2014@qatar.tamu.edu

Organizing Committee:
Dr. Leslie Seawright
Dr. Hassan Bashir
Dr. Phillip W. Gray
Dr. Troy Bickham
Liberal Arts Program ,Texas A&M University at Qatar
LAIC2014@qatar.tamu.edu
liberalarts.qatar.tamu.edu

Special Issue on Contemporary Drama [July 15, 2013]

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:41:09 -0400

Special Issue on Contemporary Drama

In the past twenty years Irish society has experienced a range of cultural, political and, centrally, financial upheaval. To what extent has Irish theatre responded to these tumultuous events? How far have traditional forms and subjects maintained their position? Or have experiment and innovation become the new distinguishing features? The guest editors of this special issue of Breac, Lindsay Haney and Shaun Richards, invite submissions addressing any aspect of recent Irish drama. In keeping with Breac’s interdisciplinary goals and digital form, we encourage submissions informed by any approach to drama and theatre and rendered as conventional essays or works in any audio or visual medium.

The issue will include essays from Brian Singleton on ANU productions, Emilie Pine on theatre’s response to abuse revelations, Niamh Malone on theatre and urban regeneration, and Susan Cannon Harris on Conor McPherson’s supernaturalism; an interview with Colm Tóibín, conducted by Paige Reynolds; and a video feature from Róise Goan, director of the Dublin Fringe Festival, on incubators and space in New Theatrical Dublin.

Breac is a peer-reviewed, open-access, paperless journal that publishes critical and creative work relating to Ireland and Irish Studies. Among its many features is a forum section that seeks to cultivate a global conversation around the published articles among its readers, students, and scholars. It also periodically streams live events through the website’s BreaCam. Subscribing to the journal is entirely free, and we encourage you to visit the website at breac.nd.edu.

We suggest a length of 4000-5000 words, but will happily consider longer articles. Deadline is July 15, 2013.

Full submission instructions are available at http://breac.nd.edu/submissions/. Questions to breac.djis@gmail.com.

SAMLA Special Session on Creating or Expanding a BA Program in English During Uncertain Times (June 20th- Abstract Deadline)

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:05:03 -0400

This panel invites participants from any college or university where there is an interest in building a B.A. in English or establishing a new programmatic track within the discipline. Participants need not be at any particular point in the process, and we hope to incorporate a diverse array of experiences and viewpoints. In other words, participants may only be thinking about the possibility of creating a program or they might be on the other side of the process. This panel will also consider what types of programs should/need to be created to meet the changing needs of students in the 21st century. We hope that this session will produce a vibrant dialogue that will serve as a bridge to future cooperation.

Because of the collaborative nature of this panel, we would like to create a roundtable atmosphere in which the audience plays an active role. Participants will each provide an informal 5-10 minute talk about their experiences and the advice they have about the process and then the rest of the session will be dedicated to having an open dialogue.

Instead of traditional proposals, those interested should send a brief 250 word description of their experiences and what they would like to gain from participating in the panel. Accepted descriptions will be shared with all participants to help generate a productive discussion. In order to be considered, these descriptions should be sent to SOrtolano@Edison.edu by June 20th.

Featured Speaker: Dr. Kristie Fleckenstein, Professor of English at Florida State University; co-collaborator in the creation and administration of FSU's undergraduate program in Editing, Writing, and Media

Call for Papers - Patents for Humanity Special Issue - August 23 2013

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:08:55 -0400

In recognition of the USPTO’s Patents for Humanity program, Technology and Innovation - Proceedings of the National Academy of Inventors, will be publishing a special issue highlighting influential humanitarian technologies, including the innovation and imagination seen in the Patents for Humanity contest submissions.

To this end, T&I is soliciting abstracts for articles or commentaries on humanitarian patents. We hope that all finalists of the Patents for Humanity contest will consider contributing to the issue.

Abstracts should be submitted by June 8, 2013. The abstract submission should contain: title, author affiliation, abstract of no more than 250 words, key words, and corresponding author’s contact information. Upon approval, full manuscripts will be due by August 23, 2013.

All submissions should meet Technology and Innovation’s author instructions and should be submitted through T&I’s website, http://submissions.academyofinventors.org/index.php/journal/about/.

Articles should concern patented technologies or innovations that have made/have the potential for making significant contributions to humanity. Articles may include commentaries by field experts concerning patents, original articles describing the development and research towards a technology or patent, and/or narrative-like stories that emphasize the societal benefits of select innovations.

Submissions may include (but are not limited to) the following topics:
• Economics of a technology, governmental and policy action, and innovation
• Environmental impact of various technologies/patent types
• Health impacts of technologies and innovations
• Analyses of the distribution and access to technology

If you have any questions, please contact Editorial Assistant Diana Vergara at TIJournal@research.usf.edu.

Technology and Innovation is published by Cognizant Communication Corporation.

International Journal of Welsh Writing in English (deadline September 2013)

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:39:20 -0400

International Journal for Welsh Writing in English

Call for Papers

The International Journal of Welsh Writing in English invites submissions for a special issue on the theme ‘Literary Topographies: Place, spatiality, cartography and Welsh Writing in English.

Guest Editors: Kirsti Bohata & Matthew Jarvis.

Welsh writing in English has a long tradition of writing ‘place’. The recent spatial turn in literary criticism has led to a productive exchange of ideas with new geography, cultural history and digital technologies. The complex ways in which literature engages with place have begun to challenge and expand methodologies in other fields at the same time as they have presented literary scholars with dynamic new avenues of critical enquiry. Innovative approaches exploring the intersections between literary texts and cartographic representations of place are being enabled by digital Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Alongside such scholarly developments, there has been a clearly identifiable resurgence in new writing from Wales that addresses the topographical, geo-political, personal and historical dimensions of our ongoing relationship with place and space.

The editors would welcome essays based on papers delivered at the recent conference on the theme of literary topographies, but new submissions on this topic are encouraged.

We also invite contributions on the other main areas of interest of the journal, particularly Dylan Thomas’s centenary (2014).

International Journal of Welsh Writing in English

The remit of the journal is to publish new research within the field of Welsh writing in English. We explicitly encourage comparative approaches, drawing not only on cognate disciplines (such as cultural studies, history, drama/performance, creative writing, film/media studies) but also making entirely new connections with disciplines such as medicine (medical humanities), computer science (digital humanities), (applied) mathematics (statistical methodologies within the humanities), and environmental science (environment, culture, place). The journal seeks to promote work, which brings English-language material into the richest of dialogues with Welsh-language literary culture. It also seeks to make connections between Welsh writing in English and applied/non-academic areas of literary life, such as the creative industries, heritage, publishing and policy-making.

The next issue of the journal is going to be published in September/October 2014.
The deadline for submissions is 1 September 2013.
For submission guidelines please see http://ijwwe.wordpress.com.
Please send any queries to the editor Dr Alyce von Rothkirch at ijwwe.editor@gmail.com.

Instrumental Reason/Constellational Form: The Frankfurt School Now

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:19:18 -0400

In “The Essay as Form,” Theodor Adorno writes that the essay (in Montaigne’s sense of an ‘attempt’) presupposes a reader who “does not think, but rather transforms himself into an arena of intellectual experience.”

Frankfurt School critical theory is often regarded as incompatible with contemporary literary and cultural studies, with the latter’s emphasis on sensation, remediation, politicized identities and social networks. We are seeking panels that reimagine Adorno and Benjamin’s work in light of recent scholarly and pedagogical trends. For instance, what can Frankfurt theory contribute to the return of experience as a critical keyword? How does “constellation” compare to other terms for complex compositions (network, assemblage, field, etc.)? Can we still justify reading and teaching literature as a challenge to instrumental reason and the “unconditional priority of ‘method,’” or should new theories and technologies make us rethink the instrumental?

Please send an abstract of about 250 words, along with a 1-3 sentence bio, to Claire Laville (clavill@emory.edu) and Elizabeth Bishop (ebbisho@emory.edu) by June 21, 2013.

For more information about SAMLA, visit http://samla.memberclicks.net/conference

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

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:43:39 -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 no later than June 15, 2013.

UPDATE: Reinterpreting Carson McCullers (The 85th Annual SAMLA Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, November 8-10, 2013)

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:32:36 -0400

DEADLINE EXTENDED: JUNE 1, 2013

To inspire more work on Georgia writer Carson McCullers and her legacy, this panel invites papers discussing innovative ways of analyzing texts related to McCullers, whether biographies, literary works, or adaptations of either. These reinterpretations might include discussions of McCullers’ works in the context of her contemporaries (Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, et al), film or dramatic adaptations of her work, or her contributions to today’s southern gothic, Grit Lit, and/or Queer Studies. We welcome essays that address the conference’s theme “Cultures, Contexts, Images, and Texts: Making Meaning in Print, Digital, and Networked Worlds” as related to studies of McCullers (however, the scope of the panel is not limited by this theme).
Please e-mail abstracts (250 to 500 words) to Courtney George, george_courtney2@columbusstate.edu, by 1 June 2013.

[UPDATE]"Past Tense, Future Tensions" SCLA Conference Oct. 18-19, 2013 (abstract deadline extended)

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:30:21 -0400

DEADLINE EXTENDED: Abstracts due 6/1/13.

The tenuous relationship between the past, present, and future complicates the practice of creating as well as translating time in imaginary works. Grammatically, tense marks more than temporality; it also highlights degrees of being that remain unreachable or forever distant. At the 2013 SCLA conference we will examine what it means to stage the past and direct the future in our literary and artistic texts. Whether anachronistic, politicized, or asynchronous, tense marks the uneasy space where recollection and projection meet.

Keynote Speaker: Wai Chee Dimock (William Lampson Professor at Yale University, and author of Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time).

We welcome 250 word paper proposals or 500 word panel proposals sent to Prof. Heather Hayton (sclaconference@guilford.edu) by June 1, 2013. Graduate students who wish to be considered for an SCLA Travel Scholarship should indicate this in their cover letter and include a short vita (2 pages maximum). We will also hold 2 undergraduate sessions and welcome undergraduate proposals (please specify).

See website for full conference cfp: http://complit-scla.org/id14.html

Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic

Thu, 09 May 2013 05:11:49 -0400

Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic

Edited by Robert McKay & John Miller (University of Sheffield, UK)

The window blind blew back with the wind that rushed in, and in the aperture of the broken panes there was the head of a great, gaunt gray wolf (Bram Stoker, Dracula)

Wolves lope across the gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to the human, they become, in the figure of the werewolf, liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal: humans in animal form and animals in human form. They are metonyms of forbidding landscapes, an unsettling howl in the distance; more intimately, their imposing fangs and gaping mouths threaten a monstrous consumption. The gothic wolf is singular, anomalous but gothic wolves form a demonic multiplicity, a pack. Wolves and werewolves function as a site for working out or contesting complex anxieties of difference: of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality; but the
imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long demonized and persecuted in their declining habitats across the world. Wolves, then, raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic.

We welcome proposals for chapters on any aspect of wolves, werewolves and the Gothic on page or screen in any historical period for a collection of essays to be submitted to The University of Wales Press series of Gothic Literary Studies. We are particularly interested in proposals that seek to read gothic wolves in the context of material histories of (for example) human/animal relations; environmental development; empire and globalization; and gender and sexuality.

Please send chapter abstracts of 500 words along with a short biography to Robert McKay (r.mckay@sheffield.ac.uk) and John Miller (john.miller@sheffield.ac.uk) by July 31st, 2013. Completed essays will be 6500 words in length and will be commissioned in September 2013 for delivery in the autumn of 2014.

Topics and approaches may include, but are not restricted to:

Lycanthropy/metamorphosis
Real and imaginary wolves
Animal ethics and the anthropomorphic imagination
Monstrosity
Fangs, mouths, the oral and the abject
Lupine presences and gothic spaces
Wolves and the Postcolonial Gothic
Captivity/escape
Wolf to Man – gothic politics from Plautus to Hobbes to Agamben
Gothic wolves, capital and globalization
Sublimity
Natural and unnatural histories
Wolf packs/lone wolves: multitudes and singularities
Ecocritical readings
Zoonosis
She-wolves, he-wolves and gender criticism
Wolfish appetite
Howling and gothic soundscapes
Queer readings
Dogs/wolves; ferity/ferocity
Wolves in sheep’s clothing
Wolves and psychoanalysis from Freud to Deleuze and Guattari
Reforming the Gothic: comic (or teen) werewolves

Italian-American Identity Politics, New Orleans, Oct. 3-5, 2013

Wed, 08 May 2013 06:39:07 -0400

Italian American Studies Association
2013 Conference
Call for Papers

Italian-American Identity Politics

New Orleans Marriott
October 3-5, 2013

This year’s conference examines the politics of the identifying term “Italian American” from multiple perspectives and in different time periods. The evocation of “Italian American” for political purposes and agendas has a varied history, e.g., to combat anti-Italian American discrimination, to rally allegiance to Mussolini’s Fascist regime, or to support feminism. In addition to various ideological positions, the structures for conjuring and maintaining ethnic identity have also been myriad, including newspapers, the Catholic Church, commercial marketing, voluntary associations, and social media sites What are the social conditions in which the ever-changing narratives of collective identity are formulated and perpetuated? How are ethnic symbols and practices mustered and re-invented at the service of “Italian American?” And ultimately, how do competing politics reveal and engender intragroup tensions but possibly also productive dialogue, both of which might re-configure understandings and enactments of the very term “Italian American?”

Suggested paper topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

•Who gets to speak for Italian Americans, both within and outside of academia, political venues, cultural venues, etc.?;
•The use of identity politics by community leaders, the press, scholars, and others;
•The limitations and/or role of public policy in shaping and/or supporting Italian American identities/communities, e.g., public housing during the 1930s-1940s, suburban development during the 1950s and 1960s, the celebration of Columbus Day;
•The self-conscious development and use of cultural and expressive forms of ethnic identity;
•The co-opting of identity politics by consumerist culture, from reality television to Olive Garden commercials;
•Resistance to elite notions of Italian-American identity;
•The role of voluntary organizations in the formation of a politicized and political Italian-American collective identity; and
•Italian Americans as a political entity in electoral politics, in Italy’s voting abroad, in relation to political activism or electoral politics in other countries with an Italian diaspora.

The conference is interdisciplinary and inter-genre in its perspective and thus is open to scholars in different disciplines, creative writers (novelists, poets, and memoirists), and visual and media artists. The conference committee is open to papers not addressing this year’s conference theme.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE VISIT www.italianamericanstudies.net.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: JUNE 15, 2013.
Abstracts for scholarly papers (up to 500 words, plus a note on technical requirements) and a brief, narrative biography should be emailed as attached documents, by June 15, 2013, to iasa2013conf@italianamericanstudies.net to whom other inquiries may also be addressed.

We encourage the submission of organized panels (of no more than three presenters and a chairperson). Submission for a panel must be made by a single individual on behalf of the group, with all the paper titles, abstract narratives, and individual biographies. The conference committee encourages organized panels that are interdisciplinary and inter-genre.

All presentations are to last no longer than twenty minutes, including audio and visual illustrations that accompany presentations.

An individual can be a paper presenter, a panel chair, a panel discussant, and a roundtable participant but cannot be any one of these more than once, eg., being a presenter and a discussant but not chairing two different panels.

Individual paper and panel proposals should include requests for audiovisual equipment (eg., computer projector).

Prospective presenters may expect to be advised of their acceptance or otherwise by August 1, 2013.

All presenters, respondents, and discussants must be members in good standing of the Italian American Studies Association by September 15, 2013.

Conference Committee:
Bénédicte Deschamps
Michael Eula
Laura E. Ruberto
Joseph Sciorra, chair

Translation and Transcendence conference: 25-26 October, 2013, Toronto

Tue, 07 May 2013 18:22:23 -0400

Modern Horizons CFP – Translation and Transcendence

For the third annual Modern Horizons conference—to be held October 25th and 26th, 2013 in Toronto, Ontario—we invite proposals for 20 minutes presentations, in English or French, on ‘Translation and Transcendence.’
Translation is prevalent in many aspects of life, whether one works between languages or across cultural divides. If translation happens each time something different, new, or unexpected is confronted or experienced, then it is basic to almost any register of human life. While recognizing that translation is often thought of as communication between languages, we wish to expand on this concept with the aim of addressing issues of identity, tradition, relationships, responsibility, and forms of culture. This conference will re-examine these ideas by considering translation alongside transcendence.

Considering translation and transcendence together is significant; since translation is literally a carrying across of meaning, transcendence is what makes this possible as it allows translation to be distinguished from mere imitation, formal repetition, or reproduction in other media. Thought of in this way, translation involves both continuity and change, because transcendence allows for the rejuvenation of ideas and experiences across change of context. Change and continuity are essentially related: we can only recognize either one through the presence of its counterpart. Contextually present, translation denies an overemphasis of one’s own time (and place), for it necessarily conjugates past with present, and in doing so prepares for a translated future.

Along with its fundamental connection with transcendence, one may think of translation in terms of appropriation and completion. Translation as appropriation occurs when the Other (text or person) is drawn into and becomes a part of our own ethos (our being, sensibility, or ethical disposition) and yet does not lose its own proper essence, its 'transcendent' difference. Translation as completion occurs when we recognize that the Other (text or person) must be read or heard in order for its meaning to be complete. This is not to say that meaning is finalized, but rather that nothing stands in a vacuum, and encounter and affirmation are essential to meaning.

With these ideas in mind, we invite abstracts of 500 words or full papers (taking not more than 20 minutes). Possible topics may include but are not limited to:
- translation and justice
- translation within tradition
- translation and scripture/the sacred
- translation as appropriation
- translation as completion
- translation and threats to integrity
- translation and fragments/the fragmentary
- translation, immanence, and transcendence
- translation and hermeneutics
- translation as response
- translation as mimesis
- translation and the question of origin
- translation and authenticity
- translation as dialogue
- translation and the question of form
- translation and fundamentalism
- the question of untranslatability
- the role of the translator today
- the limits of literal translation
- translation, metaphor, symbolism

Please submit abstracts or full papers to editors@modernhorizonsjournal.ca by 15 June 2013.
Modern Horizons
modernhorizonsjournal.ca
editors@modernhorizonsjournal.ca

cfp: symposium The Everyday Production of Presence (‏Deadline: 5/25/13)

Tue, 07 May 2013 03:58:28 -0400

CALL FOR PAPERS (deadline 25 May, 2013):
Summer symposium “Heterologies of the Everyday: The Everyday Production of Presence”. Nordic Summer University, research circle Heterologies of the Everyday, Ulsteinvik, Norway, July 29- August 5, 2013

“What is present to us... is in front of us, in reach and tangible to our bodies” (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht). In relation to the still dominant Derridean critique of the metaphysics of presence, we investigate the sense of presence in the sphere of everyday activities. The everyday is a combination of fleeting affects and states of mind, but it also includes a relationship of immediacy to life. We consider the role of sensation in this feeling of presentness and we explore temporal relations in everyday experience. We welcome papers addressing different problems in the sphere of the everyday, including (but not restricted to) natural and built environments, cultural representations, entertainment, advertising, and human relations.

Please send abstracts (300-500 words) to the coordinator of the summer symposium, Epp Annus, by 25 May 2013 (epp.annus@gmail.com). If you wish to participate without giving a paper, kindly send a short (150-300 word) description of yourself and your interests, also by 25 May 2013.

Participation fee (includes accommodation, all meals and shared activities, excluding excursions):
Single room: 5000 NOK (650 EUR)
Double room: 3150 NOK (410 EUR)
Three or five persons per room: 2400 NOK (310 EUR)
For accompanying children between 4 and 15 years on extra bed: 920 NOK (120 EUR)—this includes childcare
For accompanying children under 3 years in the parents' own bed or travel cot: Free (no childcare provided)
Participants from Nordic and Baltic countries are eligible for travel grants.

This symposium is organized by the research circle Heterologies of the Everyday, which is part of the Nordic Summer University network. This circle aims to address what is most relevant and unavoidably present for every human being: everyday existence. We analyse the experience of the everyday in its developments from the post-WWII period to the present era. This is an interdisciplinary project that works at the intersection of cultural studies, philosophy, literary criticism, art criticism, film studies, urban studies, anthropology, sociology and human geography. Our first symposium took place in Helsinki, Finland (March 2013) and focused on Everyday Aesthetics. The next symposium Everyday Moods, Affects and Attunements will be held in Estonia, March 2014.

The 2013 Summer Session of the Nordic Summer University will take place in a spectacular setting on the west coast of Norway at Sunnmøre Folkehøgskule Ulsteinvik. For more information, see: http://www.nsuweb.net/first/html/

Writing Ireland: Identity, Memory, and Place

Mon, 06 May 2013 23:52:44 -0400

"Writing Ireland: Identity, Memory, and Place"

In keeping with the special focus of SAMLA 85, we welcome papers that focus on the ways Irish identity, space, and memory are shaped through conventionally understood literary genres (poetry, fiction, drama, memoir) as well as work from related fields, including but not limited to art, critical theory, folklore, and film studies. This panel seeks to address recent trends in scholarship and the ways Irish identity (systemic or individual) and space are constructed and defined. By June 1, 2013, please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to Sarah Dyne, Georgia State University, at sdyne1@gsu.edu.

"Containers" Graduate Sudent Conference in NYC, October 18th & 19th

Mon, 06 May 2013 19:48:15 -0400

Call for Papers
4th Annual Graduate Student Conference
Stony Brook University, The State University of New York
Cultural Analysis and Theory Department

Stony Brook Manhattan
October 18th & 19th, 2013

“Containers”

Containers have a dual function - to store and to deliver - and thus an inherent provisionality. Unlike a boundary, a container denotes some kind of material object or thing. Both may imply delimitation, but while boundaries suggest an abstract notion of crossing, breaking and transgressing, containers draw attention to what is being contained, the tensile strength needed to hold it, the function of the lid and the physical force needed to unfasten that lid. The question of containment is also inherently political: it suggests a potential volatility, ephemerality or threat of the matter contained. We propose four main conceptual frames for thinking what containers are and what they do: (1) the contained object (2) the uncontainable/immaterial ephemera (3) the container’s (im)materiality and design (4) the temporality of storage and delivery. We propose that these frames offer new and unforeseen critical paradigms to certain disciplinary and theoretical perspectives.

1) Our first frame prompts inquiry into the material conditions of the physical substance filling the container’s volumetric space. Object and thing theory, as well as new materialism, provide a range of differing analytical tools for thinking through the contained substance’s materiality, its agency and its structural integrity. Thinking of the contained in terms of content naturally draws attention to the historical conditions affecting that content, such that processes of technological development, modes of consumption and distribution affect the materiality of the contained object.

2) Containers are not only material structures containing solids or fluids, but also immaterial forms that contain ephemeral substances or concepts. Adorno, for instance, postulated thought as the attempt to contain its object via the identity of the concept. Likewise, affect theory conceives of language and representation more generally in terms of its attempt to contain experience; meanwhile, affect itself exceeds such containment. Additionally, the recent turn towards questions of bodies and embodiment underscores the inherently unstable opposition of material and immaterial phenomena: the body is, at least in part, socially produced as a container of both material and immaterial flows in a way that destabilizes the distinction between the two.

3) Containers are designed for the specific function of holding in something; they must be strong and durable. And yet, the container’s design also evokes the aesthetic mode. Among other fields, film and media studies have increasingly broached design studies in exploring the aesthetic dimensions of the consoles, housings, and packaging of technological components and audio/visual media. As Lynn Spigel reminds us, a television is equally important as a piece of furniture in the aesthetic production of the domestic space.

4) The temporal frame of containment calls our attention to the process in play as a container reverses from its storage to delivery function. Whereas ‘storage’ contains notions of material apparatus, structural design and archive or collection, ‘delivery’ carries a teleological function as well as the physical place or site in which a container opens, empties or interfaces. To give just two examples, both freight containers transporting commodities along the exchange circuits of global capitalism and fiber optic cables delivering information across national and transnational communication networks act in varying ways to produce the conditions for what David Harvey identifies as the experience of space-time compression that has marked modernity and postmodernity.

How, then, might these different frameworks for thinking about containers inform our involvement with material and immaterial phenomena? What affordances does the concept of the container provide for the humanities and social sciences in engaging with contemporary social, cultural, political and economic conditions? We invite graduate student submissions from a wide variety of disciplines to engage with these questions.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• New materialisms of containers or contained
• Affect theory and the uncontainable
• Containers in/as cultural (literary, filmic, televisual, etc.) texts
• Object oriented ontology
• The body and (dis)embodiment
• Virality and containment
• Media objects as containers
• Urban space and containment
• Resistance to containment
• Thing theory of containers or contained
• Exhibition spaces as containers
• Transgression and limit experiences
• Design and containers
• The politics of containment
• ‘Trans’ -national/-gender/-disciplinary problematization of containment
• ‘Trans’ troubling of globalization, race, and the nation-state containment

Please send a 250-300 word abstract by June 15th, 2013 to catgradconf@gmail.com. We are tentatively planning on sending out acceptance and declination notices around the beginning of July.

‘Bibliography in the Digital Age’ conference: Sydney, Australia, 20–22 November 2013 [CFP deadline 26 July]

Mon, 06 May 2013 18:25:07 -0400

The annual conference of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand will be held at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 20–22 November 2013 on the theme of ‘Bibliography in the Digital Age’.

The Society invites abstracts for presentations relevant to the theme of the conference, ranging from digital scholarship, digital scholarly editions, digitising and promoting collections online through to antiquarian dealers and the material book in the digital age.

Abstracts should be of approximately 250 words for 20 minute presentations and should be received by the conference convenor, Maggie Patton, Manager, Original Materials, State Library of New South Wales, Macquarie Street, Sydney, 2000 (mpatton@sl.nsw.gov.au) by Friday 26 July.

See www.bsanz.org for further information and updates.

Call For Ecologically-minded Creative and Scholarly Work

Sat, 04 May 2013 18:00:10 -0400

Kudzu Review is seeking work for its Winter Solstice Issue 3.1 as well as for its very first themed issue, "Apocalypse & Renewal." We define ecologically-minded very broadly, and our interest is in a wide range of approaches to literature, theory, creative writing, and visual art. We are interested in everything from epic poems to recipes for kudzu cake!

Check us out today at kudzureview.com.
Deadline for Winter Solstice: September 1st; after that all work is considered for Summer Solstice.

Forms of Reading, Forms of Life

Sat, 04 May 2013 14:56:47 -0400

Forms of Reading, Forms of Life

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. 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.

UPDATE: CFP: 9/11 Popular Culture (Panels for MPCA,Oct 11-13, 2013); May 15 deadline

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:38:08 -0400

The Midwest Popular Association / American Culture Association conference will be held at the St. Louis Union Station in St. Louis, MO, this October 11-13, 2013.

The 9/11 Popular Culture area seeks essays that explore the convergence of post-9/11 themes in contemporary television, film, fiction, comics, and other artistic expression. The past year has seen an increase in exposure to explicitly post-9/11 content, with Ben Fountain’s novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk recently winning the National Book Critics Circle Award. Kathryn Bigelow’s film Zero Dark Thirty also generated an array of opinion, and little consensus, about the logic of representing counterterrorist measures. To what end should politicians voice opposition to filmic representation? What does that state about film’s perceived role in the national consciousness?

The area especially welcomes essays that consider the pedagogical approaches to teaching 9/11 culture. What methodologies do you invoke? What textual couplings are especially fruitful? What responses do you elicit when you diverge from the “accepted texts” such as Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and DeLillo’s Falling Man?

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words by April 30, 2013, by logging into the following site http://submissions.mpcaaca.org/ and submitting your abstract, together with contact information, to the 9/11 Popular Culture area. If you run into difficulties navigating the site, please email me at pauldpetrovic@gmail.com.

UPDATE: 10 Years After Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s Effect on American Culture and Identity

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:08:23 -0400

Seeking critical essays (20-30 pages in length) on texts that examine the storm's effect on American culture and identity.
Almost a decade later, distinct and meaningful body of literature has emerged following the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. The best of these works give voice to the experiences of those wounded and displaced by the storm, elucidating how we might better comprehend how and why our nation failed to provide for its citizens in their time of need, how we might better prepare for future disasters, how we might rectify the multitude of wrongs committed against the Americans in the eye of the storm.
The book will be organized in the following sections:
--Identity (Race and Gender)
--New Media
--Lit Studies (narrative, genre, history)
--Katrina in the classroom
--Disaster/Testimony
--Sociopolitical and Economic Impact
--Environmental Impact

Possible works to consider, but not limited to:
• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
• What Remained of Katrina: A Novel of New Orleans by Kelly Jameson
• Storm Surge: A Novel of Hurricane Katrina by Ramsey Coutta
• City of Refuge by Tom Piazza
• The Tin Roof Blowdown: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke
• Hurricane Katrina--what Really Happened by Nathaniel Jones
• Hurricane Song by Paul Volponi
• Rooftop Diva: A Novel of Triumph After Katrina by D. T. Pollard
• Jesus Out to Sea by James Lee Burke
• First The Dead: A Bug Man Novel by Tim Downs
• A Little Bit Ruined by Patty Friedmann
• Blink of an Eye by Rexanne Becnel
• Last Known Victim by Erica Spindler
• Murder in the Rue Chartres by Greg Herren
• Revacuation by Brad Benischek
• Tubby Meets Katrina by Tony Dunbar
• Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden
• One D.O.A., One on the Way by Mary Robison
• Down in the Flood by Kenneth Abel
• Map Of Moments by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon
• New Orleans Noir edited by Julie Smith
• Life in the Wake: Fiction from Post-Katrina New Orleans by the writers of NOLAFugees.com
• Lost and Betrayed (An American Tale): A Fictional Tale of Hurricane Katrina by Sly Fleming
• Dogs Gone Wild: After Hurricane Katrina by Theresa D. Thompson
• Katrina Nights: Love in the Time of Flooding by Fouad Khan
• Voodoo Storm: Hurricane Katrina, Death and Mystery in New Orleans by Davis Temple
• "The Passage" by Justin Cronin
• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
• Darker Angels by MLN Hanover
• Taken Away by Patty Friedmann
Deadline for submissions: July 15, 2013
Please include a brief bio with your submission. Abstracts and/or full-length submissions will be reviewed.

CREATING MYTHS AS NARRATIVES OF EMPOWERMENT AND DISEMPOWERMENT

Fri, 03 May 2013 08:52:45 -0400

Call for Papers: CREATING MYTHS AS NARRATIVES OF EMPOWERMENT AND DISEMPOWERMENT from 10 to 12 March 2014.
LDC of the High Institute of Human Sciences of Jendouba, University of Jendouba, Tunisia and the Institut de Recherche en Langues et Littératures Européennes, ILLE of the University of Haute Alsace, Mulhouse, France are pleased to announce the organisation of an international conference on ʻCreating Myths as Narratives of Empowerment and Disempowermentʼ to be held at the High Institute of Human Sciences of Jendouba from 10 to 12 March 2014.

Literacy, the advance of philosophical inquiry and Plato’s separation of ‘mythos’ from ‘logos’ signaled the birth of an intellectual hierarchy that caused the association of myth with implausibility, something that was later corroborated by the growth of scientific inquiry and rationalism. Yet, while myths seem to become distinctively associated with fantasy, their impact can still be contemplated with respect to every aspect of human history that implicates narration and (dis)empowerment. The discourses that have accompanied rising and waning orders and monarchies have shaped national feeling and identity as ‘myths’, whereby private and public narratives intersect. Whether we try to think of narratives related to the Arthurian tradition, the birth of Rome or the founding of Carthage out of an oxen skin, national identity is shaped as a space where myths of beginnings overlap with history and power. Political narratives turn into mythical accounts in the sense that they interfere between leaders and social groups to shape, explain and justify ideologies. In politics, mythologizing the narrative produces narratives that are repeatedly replicated to spawn an illusion of truth. Thus, terms such as the ‘Cold War’ or the ‘Arab Spring’ may lead us to think of uniform patterns that guided a complex set of events, disregarding their complexities and discounting alternative narratives. Moreover, as nationalism consolidated the mythologization of narratives, alternative histories started to acquire mythological significance, borrowing mythical names and imports, a trend postmodern thinking has supported.
Branches of the social sciences like anthropology and sociology have equally lent attention to myth as a space through which unrepresented groups can tell their stories in non-linear patterns, hence, for instance, the growing interest in myth in relation with gender studies and folk studies. With the works of De Saussure and Levi Strauss, linguistics and structuralism acquired a novel interest in myth. Believed to be a big vessel for collective consciousness in the Jungian sense, structuralism contends that myths of the ancient times are still present with little variations in their essential structures. While it is believed that the fading of religion and spirituality in contemporary times led to the obliteration of myth, it is not difficult to find traces of myth within the recurrence of symbols and paradigms in media and popular culture. This recurrence is akin to the telling and retelling of narratives, serving, as Hanno Hardt argues, ‘the new gods of mass culture.’

Starting from these assumptions, the organizers invite proposals for papers (of 20 minutes duration) addressing ‘Creating Myths as Narratives of Empowerment and Disempowerment.’ They particularly welcome interdisciplinary contributions, especially ones that bridge the domains of literature, cultural studies, gender, psychoanalysis and linguistics, but they equally encourage submissions on all aspects of myths that involve the ideas of narrativity, empowerment and disempowerment. To encourage innovative dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from diverse disciplines, falling within the scope of one of the following themes, among others:
Redefining myths
The Arab world, change and myth
Myth and narratives in the postcolonial context
Postmodernism and myth
Myth and folk studies
Myth and the politics of race and ethnicity
Myth as resistance and/or perpetuation
Myth in popular culture
Responses to myths
Myths, rewriting history, and power
Creating new myths
Myths of political reform and/or political repression
Myth and national identity
Feminist approaches to myths
Revisionism and myths
Science vs. myths
Myth and rhetoric
Myths and oral traditions of the Americas
(Dis)empowering myths and visual arts

PROPOSALS should be about 400 words, including the abstract and a brief biography and sent to myth.creation2014@gmail.com NO LATER THAN 30th November 2013.

CONFERENCE FEES: -Either 70 Euros for international participants and 100 Tunisian dinars for local participants (including publication, accommodation, food, refreshments, printing services, and cultural programme).
-Or 35 Euros for international participants and 50 Tunisian dinars for local participants (including presentation, lunch, coffee break, and publication).

CONFERENCE LANGUAGE is English, but proposals in French can also be accepted.

NOTIFICATION: Acceptance of proposals will be notified by December 2013.

CONTACT: For questions, please write to myth.creation2014@gmail.com

[UPDATE] PERSPECTIVES, 2013 - 2nd CALL FOR PAPERS (Deadline 31st May)

Thu, 02 May 2013 23:36:07 -0400

PERSPECTIVES ON PROGRESS 2013
An interdisciplinary postgraduate and early career researcher conference.
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. November 27-29, 2013.

In 1968, historian Sidney Pollard defined the Victorian ideal of ‘progress’ as, “the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind... that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement.” Despite the increasingly problematic nature of this ideal, the ‘progress myth’ still remains pervasive in the Western cultural tradition.

This postgraduate and early career researcher conference seeks to promote innovative interdisciplinary dialogues interrogating the concept of progress by bringing together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences.

The conference committee invites proposals for papers in the form of an abstract of between 250 and 300 words to perspectivesonprogress2013@gmail.com by 31 May 2013.

Paper format is a 20 minute paper with a 10 minute period for questions and answers.

[UPDATE]
The organising committee is pleased announce that Dr. Alastair Blanshard, Dr. Sarah Pinto, and Dr. Catherine Mills have each agreed to deliver Key Note Addresses at Perspectives on Progress, 2013.

More information about the keynotes and the conference is available on our website - http://perspectives2013.org/

For periodic updates please subscribe to our facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/perspectives2013

Link to full CFP: http://perspectives2013.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Perspectives2013-...

Apollon eJournal - Undergraduate Submissions deadline 6/15/2012

Thu, 02 May 2013 14:37:24 -0400

Check the website, apollonejournal.org, for submission details on publication, or for an application to work with us

ABOUT THE PROJECT
Apollon, an undergraduate humanities eJournal, is a new peer-reviewed publication for undergraduate humanities majors. Apollon features undergraduate research developed in humanities courses, and thus emphasizes faculty-student collaborations beyond the classroom. We invite interested students to join us by contributing leadership or original work to Apollon. Our student team participates at all levels of this ongoing project (design, review, and publication) to offer their peers a real outlet for intellectual work in the humanities. For more information you can go to the program website, www.apollonejournal.org, talk to your professors, or contact the Faculty Director, Jason Cohen, at (859) 985-3765 or cohenj@berea.edu.

CFP: 'Doonesbury': critical and cultural essays. An edited collection (Manchester University Press)

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:29:20 -0400

Doonesbury: critical and cultural essays. An edited collection (MUP).

CALL FOR PAPERS.

For over four decades G.B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury strip has reflected and refracted America’s national narratives, atomising and coalescing them within the strip format to a global audience. Chronicling, dramatising and defining key debates of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, the Pulitzer prize-winning Doonesbury has also intervened in and shaped their trajectory. Using and subverting the narrative strip form as a prism through which to explore, catalogue, landmark and define its contemporary moment, Doonesbury represents a significant artistic, cultural, comedic and critical achievement.

Doonesbury’s status as a symptomatic corollary, imaginative rendition, cultural-historical document, and exploration of America, as well as the strip’s diversity of interests, global reach, and cultural reception and standing, offer fertile grounds for fresh contemporary readings hitherto unfulfilled by academic engagement. Proposals are therefore invited for contributions to an edited collection of critical and cultural essays to be published through Manchester University Press that engage with the long-running, iconic strip.

The following themes are broadly suggested as points for discussion and points of departure for submitted proposals:

- Doonesbury: comedy and comment.
- Doonesbury’s narrative form: fragmentation, linearity and cohesion:
- Doonesbury 40: A Retrospective: the great American novel?
- Doonesbury and the American pastoral: from Thoreau to Walden commune and beyond.
- Doonesbury, representation, war and trauma: Vietnam, Iraq 1, the war on terror, Iraq 2, Afghanistan and the war within.
- Doonesbury and the comic tradition: art, satire, liberty and independence.
- Doonesbury’s and America’s political debates.
- Doonesbury and activism: civil and/or gay rights representation.
- Reach and syndication: virtual Doonesbury, the daily strip and the dot com.
- Doonesbury, the counter-culture and the baby-boomers: from protest to Gen X.
- On the cover of Rolling Stone: Doonesbury, music, business and cultural representation.
- Bright Lights, Big City: Doonesbury and the eighties.
- Doonesbury and the American presidency: idealism, reality and representation.
- Doonesbury, humour, dissidence and censorship.

It must be stressed that these are only suggested areas of discussion and that proposals dealing with any aspect of the strip, or advancing alternative disciplinary, theoretical or commentative approaches will be considered.

Proposals should be no more than 1000 words in length, and should be submitted to a.jackson@mmu.ac.uk no later than July 31st 2013.

Inquiries are welcome and should also be addressed to a.jackson@mmu.ac.uk

The First Asian Conference on Politics, Economics and Law 2013

Thu, 02 May 2013 04:19:10 -0400

The First Asian Conference on Politics, Economics and Law will be held from November 21-24 2013 at Ramada Osaka, Osaka, Japan.

ACPEL 2013 Conference Theme: Political Governance, Legal Structures and Economic Sustainability

ACPEL 2013 Sub-Themes:
Asian Political Systems, Trends and Sustainability
Asian Economic Systems, Trends and Sustainability
Asian Legal Systems, Trends and Sustainability
Asian Political, Economic, and legal Systems in Global Context
Current Issues in Asian Politics, Economics and Law

Authors are asked to submit under the following ACPEL streams:

Politics Streams (P)

P1. Political Participation and Representation
P2. Governance, Institutions and Public Policy
P3. Gender, Sexuality and Politics
P4. Political Economy, Welfare and Labour
P5. International Governance, Conflict and Development
P6. Political Theory
P7. Multiculturalism
P8. Human Rights
P9. Social Movements

Economics Streams (E)
Streams arranged under the JEL codes

Law Streams (L)

L1. Civil Law and the Court
Including: Torts, Equity and Succession, Court Management, Judicial Administration, Civil Procedure, and Civil Litigation
L2. Environmental and Resource Management Law
(Including: Water Law, Land Law, Energy Law, Mineral Resource Law, Mining and Petroleum Law, International Environmental Law, Environmental Regulation and Reform, Issues in Development, Asian Environmental Law in a Global Perspective, and Resource Management Law
L3. International Law: Contemporary Issues and Solutions
Including: Public International Law, Laws of Armed Conflict and International Humanitarian Law, Law of International Trade, Legal Issues in International Development, The Law of the Sea, International Treaties and Conventions, United Nations Charter, Globalisation and Governance, Terrorism and International Law, The Law of the World Trade Organisation, Indigenous Peoples and International Law, Private International Law, International Trade Law, and Refugee and Asylum Law
L4. Corporate and Commercial Law
Including: Regulatory Regimes and the Global Economy, Creditors' Remedies and Consumer Protection, Revenue Law, Commercial Transactions, Competition Law, Insurance Law, Corporate Governance in Context: Legal and Ethical Issues, Sports and Media Law, Corporate Governance and Directors Duties, Shareholders' Remedies, International Business Law, Issues in Commercial Law, Issues in Corporate Law, Corporate Entities, Revenue Law, Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law, The Law of Contracts
L5. Banking, Securities and Finance Law
Including: International Securities Regulation, Banking Law, Bankruptcy and Foreclosure, Corporate Securities and Finance Law
L6. Law of Human Rights and Social Justice
Including: Access to Justice, Restorative Justice, Race, Gender, Sexuality and the Law, Asian and Pacific Indigenous Peoples, Women and the Law, Relationship Property Issues in Family Law, Comparative Child and Family Law, International Legal Issues of Child Access and Custody, Legal Action and Research for Communities and Sustainability, Contemporary International Indigenous Issues, Reconciliation and Indigeneity, Indigenous Governance, Indigenous Land Law, Family Law, The Law of Restitution, Customary Law and Indigenous Peoples Rights, National and International Human Rights Law, Intersectionalities: Gender, Race, Sexuality and the Law, Immigration and Refugee Law, and Feminist Legal Theory
L7. Public Law and Policy
Including: Public Policy, Comparative Law in the Asia Pacific Region, Issues in Constitutional Law, Issues in Public Law, Judicial Review, Constitutional Law and Administrative Law
L8. Dispute Resolution: Contemporary Approaches
Including: Arbitration and Litigation, Mediation: Law, Principles and Practice, Managing Conflict and Consensus, Negotiation and Mediation, and Issues in Alternative Dispute Resolution
L9. Law of Intellectual Property, Information and New Technologies
Including: Cyberlaw, Law and New Technologies, Intellectual Property Law, Information Technology and the Law, and Legal Issues in the control and Access to Information
L10. Laws of Health and Medicine
Including: Health and Safety Law, Medical Law, Disability Law, Laws of Accident Compensation, and Mental Health Law
L11. Labour and Employment Law
Including: International Industrial Relations and Labour Law, Legal Issues in the Globalized Workplace, and Employment Law
L12. Criminal Justice Policy and Law
Including: Criminal Law, Advocacy, Transnational Criminal Law, Sentencing: Rehabilitation and Punishment, and the Law of Evidence.
L13. Legal Theory, Methodology and Ideology
Including: Legal Research, Theory and Methods in an Asian Context, Jurisprudence, Issues in Private Law, Applied Legal Theory, Issues of Legal Practice, and Legal Ethics

Interdisciplinary Streams (ID)

ID 1: Interdisciplinary Law, Economics and Politics
ID 2: Interdisciplinary Law and Politics
ID 3: Interdisciplinary Law and Economics
ID 4: Interdisciplinary Politics and Economics

Deadline for submission of abstracts: July 1 2013

Results of abstract reviews returned to authors: Usually within two weeks of submission

Deadline for full conference registration payment for all presenters: November 1 2013

Full Conference Programme Published Online: November 6 2013

Deadline for full paper: December 1 2013

Conference Proceedings published: January 15 2013

ACPEL Conference: November 21-24 2013

Yozo Yokota
ABMC/ACPEL Keynote Speaker
Jerry Platt
ABMC/ACPEL 2013 Conference Co-Chair and Featured Speaker
Peter Gardiner
ABMC/ACPEL 2013 Featured Speaker

CFP: After Glissant: Caribbean Aesthetics and the Politics of Relation (Deadline: 1/15/14)

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:22:41 -0400

Discourse – Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture
Call for Papers

After Glissant: Caribbean Aesthetics and the Politics of Relation

Two recent events have left an undeniable imprint on the critical analysis of Caribbean literary and cultural studies: the February 2011 passing of Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, perhaps the most influential Caribbean intellectual in the last fifty years, and the June 2012 opening of Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, an unprecedented, three-museum art exhibit in New York City that sought to showcase the cultural genealogies of the Antillean region and its diasporic offshoots. Throughout five theme-based segments that examined aesthetic creation through the frameworks of race, ethnicity, nationality, geography, and popular culture, Crossroads of the World follows a deliberately fragmentary structure that echoes Glissant’s ideas on the Caribbean. Instead of experiencing the exhibit as what he calls in Caribbean Discourse “the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History,” spectators were confronted with an accumulation of “subterranean convergences” that traced cultural continuities not only between the archipelago and the continental territories that constitute the basin, but also with the metropolis. Unsurprisingly, the exhibit catalogue’s main chapters conclude with an excerpt from Caribbean Discourse. This textual fragment, which can be read as a memorial site in honor of Glissant, marks the significance of his vision not only for the curation of the show, but for Caribbean aesthetics as a “whole.”

The spirit of Glissant continues to stimulate creative and scholarly work on the historical fragments and possible futures that constitute the Caribbean’s heterogeneous cultural singularity: from the violent shocks of colonialism and the slave-based plantation system to the also violent dislocations experienced and represented by its peoples under neoliberal capitalism. Yet while scholars and artists carry on creatively appropriating Glissant’s theories, a new generation of cultural producers seeks to interrogate and transform the ways the region has been imagined and represented. Critical voices have also emerged from diverse fields to problematize the historical, cultural, political valence of Glissant’s work, especially his late writings, accusing him of abandoning the politics of decolonization he championed in his younger days and replacing it with an exclusively cultural and poetic vision.

Inspired by this debate and by how it performs ongoing tensions between aesthetics and politics within the field, we invite critical interventions that seek to analyze and explore Caribbean cultural production from the vantage point of this post-Glissantian moment. What is the relationship of the Caribbean to colonial and post-colonial studies? In what new directions is Caribbean cultural production headed, directions that Glissant could not or did not anticipate? What new understandings can we bring to the Glissantian understanding of History, or to such terms as “relation,” “filiation” and “diversion” (détour)?

Articles should be no longer than 7,500 words, should be formatted according to the Chicago Style (Humanities) Format, and should be sent to both editors.

Deadline: January 15, 2014

Editors:

Kahlil Chaar-Pérez (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University)
kahlilchaar@fas.harvard.edu

Emily A. Maguire (Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Northwestern University)
e-maguire@northwestern.edu

CALL FOR PAPERS Vol 4, No 2: ECOLOGY

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:50:06 -0400

The Dandelion editors seek submissions on the theme of ecology for our next issue.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Ecocriticism
• Political ecology
• Eco-poetics and nature writing
• The pastoral
• Urban/rural space and/or wildness and civilization
• Ecology and interdisciplinarity
• Romantic ecology and its legacy
• Biotechnologies
• Cybernetics and ecology
• Art and eco-activism
• Ecology and the military-industrial complex
• Nuclear criticism
• Ecofeminism
• Ecology and modernity/postmodernity

This issue is inspired by Silent Spring: Chemical, Biological and Technological Visions of the Post-1945 Environment, a collaborative workshop series taking place at Birkbeck School of Arts and the Centre for Modern Studies at York University.* Rachel Carson’s classic polemic Silent Spring celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2012: it still stands as one of the most influential texts on the damage caused to the natural environment by chemicals and nuclear fallout in the twentieth century. In line with the workshop series, this issue takes the anniversary of Carson’s text as a starting point for exploring how biological, chemical and technological changes to the environment have shaped cultural explorations of nature and landscape across the humanities.

We welcome both long (5000-8000 words) and short (under 5000 words) articles. We also encourage conference and event reports, blog posts, book, film and exhibition reviews, podcasts and artwork. We welcome submissions from doctoral students, early career researchers, established academics and independent practioners, working in all disciplines.

Send submissions by 31 July 2013 to the editors via mail@dandelionjournal.org or through the Dandelion website. Complete instructions for submissions can be found at http://dandelionjournal.org/

All referencing and style is required in full MHRA format as a condition of publication. Submitted articles should be academically rigorous and ready for publication.

*To register for the next workshop, set to take place on 7 June at Birkbeck, email silentspring2013@gmail.com or visit www.silentspringboard.or

Dandelion is an online postgraduate journal and research network, supported by Roberts Funding and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It aims to bring together a diversity of works from researchers in the arts, to offer collaborative research and training possibilities, and to promote an independent, cross-institutional space for professional development.

[UPDATE] Extended deadline for Fashion panels at 2013 MPCA/ACA conference

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:39:13 -0400

FASHION
2013 Midwest Popular Culture Association Conference
Friday-Sunday, October 11-13, 2013
St. Louis, MO
St. Louis Union Station Hotel, A Doubletree by Hilton

Deadline: May 15, 2013
Submissions.mpcaaca.org

Topics can include, but are not limited to fashion as it is represented in literature, film, television, or music, fashion as it pertains to current popular culture or popular culture of any time period of the past, the fashions of celebrities, or sociological implications of fashion in our culture.

Please upload 250 word abstract proposals on any aspect of Fashion to the Fashion area, http://submissions.mpcaaca.org/.

Any questions? Please email Kelli Purcell O’Brien at kobrien1@memphis.edu.

More information about the conference can be found at http://www.mpcaaca.org/

Please note the availability of graduate student travel grants: http://mpcaaca.org/conference/travel-grants/.

Please include name, affiliation, and e-mail address with the 250 word abstract. Also, please indicate in your submission whether your presentation will require an LCD Projector.

Producing Public Memory: Museums, Memorials, and Archives as Sites for Teaching “Writing”

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:47:53 -0400

We invite proposals from teachers, scholars, and researchers in composition, literacy, and rhetorical studies for an edited collection that investigates museums, memorials (permanent, temporary, and spontaneous), and archives as sites of rhetorical education. More particularly, we seeks essays that can help to initiate a new pedagogical phase in the study of public memory by moving beyond rhetorical analyses of museums, memorials, and archives to focus instead on the rich pedagogical and public work that can take place when faculty and students collaborate with museum founders, curators, exhibit designers, archivists, librarians, and others.
In recent years, scholars and teachers in rhetoric, print culture, and writing studies have increasingly been fascinated by the persuasive work accomplished by museums, memorials, archives, and similar sites (e.g., Bernard-Donals; Dickinson, Blair, Ott; Halloran). This diverse, interdisciplinary body of scholarship has certainly enriched contemporary understandings of how public memory is created and preserved. Rarely, though, have museums, memorials, archives, and other sites been seen by teachers as sites for the production of public memory and the teaching of writing. We believe consequential and collaborative pedagogical and public work can be undertaken at sites of public memory.

While the following list is not exhaustive, possible chapters in this collection may fall within these broad categories:

• Curricular arguments and analyses of how courses in public memory can contribute to the rhetorical education of undergraduates in general and writing majors in particular;

• Research studies (classroom-based, archival, ethnographic, qualitative, quantitative, etc.) on projects that have engaged students in the production of public memory at museums, memorials, and archives)

• Discussions of the relationships between the academy and the community at sites of public memory.

For more details about the types of questions the editors envision potential chapters addressing, please see a fuller CFP at .

Essays that are collaboratively authored by faculty and students and/or faculty and professionals who work in museums, memorials, and archives are particularly welcome.

Please submit a proposal, approximately 500 words, that discusses the proposed chapter to the editors—Jane Greer greerj@umkc.edu and Laurie Grobman leg8@psu.edu. Questions and queries are welcome as well. The deadline for proposal submissions is July 15, 2013.

Jacket2 Feature: Leslie Scalapino (deadline June 15, 2013)

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:05:25 -0400

JACKET2 FEATURE: LESLIE SCALAPINO

Edited by Alicia Cohen, Judith Goldman & E. Tracy Grinnell

OPEN CALL

An upcoming special issue of Jacket2 will be dedicated to the work of poet Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010). The editors seek essays that have some degree of focus on Scalapino’s more recently published works (from 2008 to 2011) including the new edition of How Phenomena Appear to Unfold; The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom; Flow—Winged Crocodile & A Pair/Actions Are Erased/Appear; Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows; The Animal is in the World like Water; and It’s go in horizontal.

In the spirit of Scalapino's exploratory, adventurous body of work, we welcome essays in the most capacious sense of that genre—from academic analyses to non-traditional framings, openings, and investigations. We also encourage submission of more personal reflections both creative and critical by writers discussing the impact of Scalapino's writing on their own work. We are further interested in visual artwork inspired by or pertaining to her oeuvre.

Prospective essayists and artists are invited to submit finished works via this Submittable link no later than June 15, 2013. Essays should be no longer than 7000 words (approx. 12 pp.), formatted according to Chicago style as appropriate, accompanied by a 100-200 word author bio.

For more on Leslie Scalapino, please visit her website: www.lesliescalapino.com

IMPORTANT: REVISED DEADLINE

The deadline for submissions has been moved to JUNE 15, 2013. If you would like to send a query or proposal please do so before this deadline. The new deadline is for completed works only.