cfp.english.upenn.edu

Call for Papers: Approaches to Teaching Ethnic American Literatures in the 21st Century [Update]

Contemporary ethnic American award winning authors like Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, and Jhumpa Lahiri have interpreted and provoked self-legitimization of the varied realms of ethnic experience and memory in American society. Ethnic American literatures present an ongoing dialogue between ethnic individual and mainstream culture, history, class, religion, politics and sexuality. All of these issues are at play for teachers attempting to establish ethnically inclusive literary curriculums.

Teaching ethnic American literatures in the new millennium requires that instructors acknowledge the contemporary contexts and technologies to which students are exposed as they develop the pedagogical framework for their literature classrooms. For 21st century instructors, this necessarily means the adjustment of certain traditional teaching practices and formats, the application of interdisciplinary pedagogies and literary theories in the teaching of both classic and more contemporary texts, and the recognition of an ever-diversifying, technologically advancing, globalized student body.

Approaches to Teaching Ethnic American Literature in the 21st Century is an edited collection of previously unpublished essays designed to acknowledge the changing landscape of teaching ethnic American literature. A 21st century student body is more diverse in background, experience and professional goals, and its accompanying needs and contexts necessitate instructors are theoretically grounded with practical methodologies for teaching ethnic American literatures in secondary, post-secondary, and online education courses. We seek essays that examine meaning and craft in works predominately published after 1995. Essays should reflect on objectives, how instructors situate themselves and their students to acknowledge theirs and the contexts of others, even as they provide clear examples and resources for other teachers who seek innovation and opportunities to transform the formats and structures of their literature classrooms.

The essays requested for this volume should connect the scholarship of teaching and learning with interdisciplinary theories to show, by example, approaches available for a 21st century audience and literary atmosphere. We are interested in essays from a variety of U.S. literary traditions: African American, Latino/a, Asian American, Native American, Arab American, Jewish American, Caribbean American, immigrant and other groups, individually and comparatively, that have been historically considered “ethnic” within their historical context in the United States (eg., Italian American, Irish American). This text is designed to provide a much-needed resource for teachers who wish to augment their teaching with contemporary literature, methods, and discussions.

In particular, we seek chapters that address award winning works, such as: Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bone, The Dew Breaker, and Krik? Krak!, Ha Jin’s Waiting and War Trash, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Denise Chavez’ Face of an Angel, Abraham Rodriguez, Jr.’s Spidertown, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Reservation Blues, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Arranged Marriage, Lucille Clifton’s The Terrible Stories and Blessing the Boats, Gayl Jones’ The Healing, Ai’s Vice: New & Selected Poems, Clarence Major’s Configurations, Sherod Santos’ The Pilot Star Elegies, Agha Shahid Ali’s Rooms are Never Finished, Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, Alberto Rios’ the Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, Naomi Shihab Nye’s 19 Varieties of Gazelle, Wanda Coleman’s Mercurochrome, Maria Espinosa’s Longing, Kimiko Hahn’s The Unbearable Heart, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Arthur Sze’s Archipelago, Robert Viscusi’s Astoria, Alurista’s Et Tu…Raza.

Deadline: January 18, 2010.

Please send completed essays of 15-25 pages in MS Word to adamshd@muohio.edu OR send hard copies with SASE to:

Helane Androne, PhD
English Department
Miami University, Middletown campus
4200 E. University Blvd.
Middletown, OH 45042
adamshd@muohio.edu

CSU Fullerton's Annual Graduate Conference, February 5-6, 2010
The Acacia Group at Cal State Fullerton, an organization of English graduate students and faculty members committed to developing student scholastic advancement while fostering a strong sense of academic community, is currently accepting proposals for its annual graduate conference.

While the Acacia Conference is organized to meet the needs of graduate students and faculty, we welcome contributions from academics at all levels.

We hope to inspire interdisciplinary discourse through this year’s theme of Parallax, and as such we are interested in submissions exploring ideas associated with the concept of perspective. Viewing a text from multiple or shifting perspectives displaces it from its original foundation, thus creating the opportunity for an individual to resituate the text within a broader context. In order to consider theorizations, interpretations, and representations of parallax as it pertains to the various forms of texts that exist in our society, we would like to draw together work from a range of disciplines including but not limited to English, Rhetoric and Composition, Creative Writing, Linguistics, Comparative Literature, American Studies, History Philosophy, Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Art History, Film and Television Studies, Popular Culture, etc.

For individual papers, please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biography (only 1-3 sentences). Due to the nature of this year’s theme, we are also welcoming coauthored papers as well as panel submissions. For panels, please submit a 250-word description of the panel topic in addition to the individual paper submissions. Submissions should be sent to acaciaconference2010@gmail.com by December 11, 2009. Please include the title of your paper, school affiliation (if any), and your e-mail address along with your submission.

Papers are invited for a panel on the depiction of religious communities in ethnic U.S. literatures for the 2010 MELUS Conference at The University of Scranton (PA).

Borrowing Augustine's phrase "city of God" but broadening it beyond his Christian focus, this panel explores the ways in which ethnic American writers examine the role of religious communities from any religious tradition. For Augustine, the city of God is a distinct community within the larger geo-political community; he plays off the early church's sense that it was a place where warring social groups—including ethnic groups—would reconcile and live as equals. However, it is often said nowadays that in our culture, the most segregated part of the week is Sunday mornings; this sentiment suggests that religion often preserves ethnic and racial divisions instead of erasing them.

The panel will discuss the portrayal of religious communities by ethnic U.S. authors. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• How are these issues represented in our literatures?
• What roles do religious communities play within the texts?
• How are religious communities portrayed as either maintaining ethnic identity or as breaking down barriers between ethnic groups?
• In what ways are these communities presented as distinct communities within the world—that is, as a third community between the minority and dominant communities?
• When and how are minority religious communities presented as being at odds with the larger minority culture(s)?
• How are non-minority religious communities presented as either aiding or obstructing the growth of individuals and/or the progress of civil rights?

Proposals may cover texts from any period. Presenters will need to be MELUS members by the time of the conference.

Please submit your 250-word proposal—along with any audio-visual needs—as an email (no attachments please) to Steve Pearson at aristophanes68@hotmail.com by Friday, 11 December, 2009.

“The Aural Archive”

ACLA annual convention, New Orleans, April 1-4, 2010

Proposals due: Nov. 23, 2009 [Deadline extended]

This seminar aims to draw out several theoretical and methodological questions lurking behind recent work in media studies, performance studies, musicology, and literary studies: If the aural realm is ephemeral (as is often said), how does it factor into the historical record? When you listen to your archive, what and how do you hear? And how do you theorize the silences and noises in the archival grain?

Efforts to reconstruct the sonic and vocal worlds of the past are often tinged with the pathos of loss, the “lost sounds” of an impoverished archive devoid of those voices that did not command the technologies of writing. Studies of oral cultures, historical performance, theater, music, or early radio are structured by the gaps in the written record, and by the writtenness of the record. On the other hand, sounds captured on wax cylinders, film, magnetic tape, vinyl or digital encoding are not necessarily more immediately present: complex histories of circulation, mediation, reception, and power lie between us and the sounds of the past.

We hope to begin a discussion on the problems and promises of the aural archive with scholars from a range of disciplines and fields. For those working in periods before recorded sound, how do you negotiate printed records to reconstruct sensory experiences of voice and ear? For scholars working on twentieth and twenty-first-century materials, how do you historicize the acts of listening to sound recordings, radio, film, television, etc.? What might a focus on aurality allow us to add to the ever-expanding discourse surrounding “the archive”?

Submit paper proposals online via the ACLA 2010 website:

http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php

[Select "The Aural Archive" as the seminar]

For more information about the seminar, contact:

Michael Cohen, LSU: mcohen@lsu.edu
Sarah J. Townsend, NYU: sjt239@nyu.edu

For more information about the conference, see:

http://www.acla.org/acla2010/

The Drawn Map.
March 13-14, 2010
Northeastern University’s
English Graduate Student Association
Call for Papers

Keynote Speaker:
Professor Martin Brückner,
University of Delaware

Faculty Speaker: Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern University

& Professionalization Roundtable:
“Mapping the Archive”

The English Graduate Student Association of Northeastern University invites papers for this year’s conference which explore maps and mappings in literature, theory, film and art. We might think of the discourse of literature as a spatial practice, working through global paradigms, transnational encounters, and charting the topographies and contours of cultural, textual, and scholarly exchange.

The concept of “The Drawn Map” implies a sense of historical geography and the tensions of the mapped page, the body, the archive, as they are recorded, drawn, and revised. Maps are surfaces which inscribe codes of understanding, knowledge and the architecture of power. They are also flexible cartographies, subject to change, erasure, and new demarcations. Maps impel exploration, travel, conquest, cosmopolitanism, curiosity, diaspora, migration and imagination. They are also scientific in their plan, graph, and measure. And finally, we might think of maps as articulations- the practice of identifying, naming, classifying and recording.

200-word abstracts may be sent to neuegsa@gmail.com by December 20. Please include your name and university affiliation.

Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to:

Cosmopolitan Geographies
Maps and Methodology
Imagined or Embodied Geographies
The Map as Text
Mapping the Field
Mapping Gender and Identity
Maps, Memoirs, Memory
Aesthetic Geographies
Formal and Informal Geographies
Circulation of Culture
Mapping the Classroom
Geopolitics and Geoliteracies
Mappings of Empire
Travel Narratives
New Maps, New Borderlands
The Economy of Maps
Archival Spaces
Mapping Bodies, Mapping Space

Call for Papers: Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, SW/TX PCA/ACA

The 2010 Southwest/Texas Popular Culture/American Culture Association 30th Annual Conference, The Hyatt Regency Conference Hotel, Albuquerque, NM, February 10-13, 2010.

The Area Chairs of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Area would like to invite paper and panel proposals on Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer. This year our area will be honored with special events, films, guests, and presentations!
Please send queries, 250 word paper proposals, or 500 word panel proposals to

Ximena Gallardo
xgallardo@lagcc.cuny.edu

Include with the submission full contact information for each presenter including email, phone, snail mail, and institutional affiliation.

Deadline for proposal submissions: December 1, 2009. The registration deadline is December 15, 2009. All participants must register by that date or they will not be permitted to present or appear in the program.

For more details on the conference, please visit the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture/American Culture Association: http://www.swtxpca.org/documents/home.html.

More about the SF&F Area
The Area was founded in 1995 by Prof. Richard Tuerk of the Texas A&M University-Commerce (formerly East Texas State University) and author of Oz in Perspective (McFarland, 2007). The Area is currently chaired by Ximena Gallardo C. of the City University of New York-LaGuardia and co-author of Alien Woman: The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley (Continuum: 2004), Alyson Buckman of the California State University-Sacramento, Tamy Burnett of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Brian Cowlishaw of Northeastern State University. Though the co-chairs consult on submissions, Ximena is primarily responsible for the general organization of the conference panels and coordinates special panels, Alyson and Tamy coordinate the Whedonverse panels (Buffy, Firefly, Angel, and etc.), and Brian reviews and organizes the literature panels.

Visit us at our Facebook site!
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=7322&post=37243&uid=53194657668#...

With an average of 70+ presenters annually, The Science Fiction and Fantasy Area of the Southwest and Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association is one of the most dynamic and well attended areas at the conference. Numerous book and article publications have originated from our panels.

The title of this panel, borrowed from James Baldwin's "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," suggests its emphasis. I seek papers examining literary representations of metaphorical or literal violence against the black body, particularly male, as signifiers of patriotic Americanness. In addition to other interventions, papers engaging the following are welcome:

1. Comparative considerations of ways in which the black male body, itself, mandates feared re-visioning of inherently flawed national identity construction both in the past and present.
2. Comparative examinations of the rising tide of white patriotism in America—a tide in which race-baiting and calls for violence are privileged—where once again the common enemy is the black male body legally empowered to threaten what some whites believe to be their property—the nation.

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to dsimmons@lovett.org by January 10, 2010. Those accepted will be notified by January 20, 2010.

We live in a world that is dominated by fear. We are increasingly afraid to walk in our city streets, populated as they are by feral youths, drug-dealers and surveillance cameras. The threat of global warming and climate change is ever-present, and accompanied by the even greater fear that we’ll be too late to do anything about it. Then of course there’s terror: frightened of a Taliban invasion, apparently, we are still fighting in Afghanistan after eight years and pursuing a worldwide “war on terror”. And if that’s not enough, we are becoming ever more afraid of alcohol, of food, of being too fat, of being too thin; and afraid even of sex. In this climate of fear, it is not surprising that we should also have become terrified of politics, in case we suddenly have to think about an idea, let alone act on it. Our politicians appear as afraid of politics as we are: which is one reason they’re privatising everything in sight, so as to evade responsibility for it. As for ideas, they really are terrifying, and our young people have to be protected from them at all costs. In short, the “anti-ideological” determination to take the politics out of politics is closely related to the social, cultural and intellectual dominance of fear as the leitmotif of our everyday lives.

This avowedly interdisciplinary conference seeks to do two things: to describe and analyse what might be termed the contemporary spheres and roles of fear as it is played out both in social, cultural and intellectual life and in day to day life; and to offer ways of escaping those fears. Likely themes might be the following, although the conference is by no means limited to these:

• The history of fear as an organising principle of social life.
• The ideological role of fear.
• The fear of ideology.
• Fear of the other; fear of ourselves.
• Surveillance, anti-social behaviour orders and the “underclass”.
• “Food fascism” and the fear of pleasure.
• Medicine and the inculcation of fear.
• Anti-education in schools and universities.
• The fear of ideas, in both the everyday and the academic worlds.
• Fear of the body.
• Fear of the mind.
• Fear in the media; in film; in literature; in art.
• The sophistical undermining of critical thought and theory.
• Fear of radicalism in politics.
• Fear of catastrophe.
• Capitalism and catastrophe.
• Fear of financial collapse.
• The representation of fear and the fear of representation.
• The architecture of fear.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be emailed to Nicola Clewer by 22 February 2010: nc95@brighton.co.uk

For the full call for papers, updates and further information about the centre please visit the CAPPE website:
www.brighton.ac.uk/CAPPE

The Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) is hosting its 108th Annual Conference, on Saturday and Sunday, November 13-14, 2010, at Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawaii. Interested parties may propose special sessions on specific topics by December 15, 2009.

Special session topics may deal with any topic not covered by standing session topics (for the list of standing sessions, and for more information about how to propose a special topic, please see the PAMLA bylaws: http://pamla.org/constitution_and_bylaw ). Since PAMLA has standing sessions in general areas (such as Asian American Literature, Autobiography, Chaucer and Related Topics, Children’s Literature, Comparative Literature, Comparative Media, Composition and Rhetoric, Critical Theory, East-West Literary Relations, English (to 1700), Film and Literature, Film Studies, Germanics, and Italian) it is important to have a more specific focus in designing a special session.

PAMLA members may propose special sessions on any literary, language, or cultural topic, but PAMLA is particularly requesting special session proposals dealing with the topic “Picturing Oceania and the Pacific.”

Special Session proposals for 2010’s PAMLA Conference in Hawaii are due to PAMLA First Vice-President, Sabine Wilke (University of Washington), by December 15, 2009: wilke@u.washington.edu . Please send a title and abstract of approximately thirty-five words.

Should the topic be approved, the proposer will act as presiding officer for the session and will be responsible for publicizing the session (the session will also be listed on PAMLA’s website), inviting participants, judging and accepting or rejecting paper proposals, designing the program, and submitting it to the Executive Director. Please contact Craig Svonkin, PAMLA Executive Director, with any further questions: svonkin@netzero.com .

PAMLA Conference Dates to Remember:
Electronic Submissions of abstracts for the 2010 conference are due by March 15, 2010 (Session Presiding Officers will receive emails of these submissions automatically; AV requests must be included with abstract submission to be considered).

Session Presiding Officers must send acceptance and regret emails to those who have submitted papers for consideration by April 1, 2010.

Electronic program copy for 2010 conference due from Session Presiding Officers to Executive Director by April 20, 2010.

Conference participants must pay PAMLA dues by May 1, 2010, and must pay PAMLA Conference fees no later than September 15, 2010.

_a/b: Auto/Biography Studies_ invites submissions for a special issue focusing on African American life writing. We are interested in essays that focus on the contemporary issues of identity that complicate the categories "African American" and "life writing," particularly where these intersect with discussions of genre or discipline. We would like especially to see essays addressing neglected texts, authors, or forms, including life writing in new or neglected media. Essays that advance new approaches to African American life writing, emphasize new critical approaches, discuss lesser known authors, or that address larger generic issues within African American life writing are welcome.

Manuscripts should be e-mailed to the guest editor Stacy Boyd sboyd@westga.edu by January 31, 2010. Manuscripts should be between 25-30 pages and formatted according to MLA guidelines.

Watermark, an annual scholarly journal published by graduate students in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach, is now seeking papers for our fourth volume to be published in May 2010.

Watermark is dedicated to publishing original critical and theoretical papers concerned with literature of all genres and periods, as well as papers representing current issues in the fields of rhetoric and composition. As this journal is intended to provide a forum for emerging voices, only student work will be considered.

Possible essay topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Gendered, cultural, racial, and economic borders and transitions - Digital rhetoric in the media age
- Reconsidering regional and/or sentimental literature
- The construction of minimalism
- (Re)configuring the colonial experience
- Dissident ideas and official voices
- Issues of identity, discipline, and excess
- The ethnicity of pastiche
- “Green” aesthetics and artistic forms
- Critical perspectives on contemporary popular culture

The deadline for submissions is January 8, 2010.

All submissions should include a cover letter that includes your name, phone number, email address, and the title of your essay or book review. All submissions should be approximately 10-15 pages and must be typed in MLA format with a standard 12 pt font. Please do not include your name on the essay itself as it will
be reviewed by a blind peer-review panel. Submissions will not be returned.

Email papers and cover letters as separate Word attachments to: editor@watermarkjournal.com.

You may mail submissions to the Watermark mailbox:
CSULB Department of English
Attn: Watermark
1250 Bellflower Blvd.
Long Beach, CA 90840

Please direct all questions to: editor@watermarkjournal.com

WATERMARK CALL FOR PAPERS
Watermark, an annual scholarly journal published by graduate students in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach, is now seeking papers for our third volume to be published in May 2010. Watermark is dedicated to publishing original critical and theoretical papers concerned with literature of all genres and periods, as well as papers representing current issues in the fields of rhetoric and composition. As this
journal is intended to provide a forum for emerging voices, only student work will be considered.

Possible essay topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Gendered, cultural, racial, and economic borders and transitions - Digital rhetoric in the media age
- Reconsidering regional and/or sentimental literature
- The construction of minimalism
- (Re)configuring the colonial experience
- Dissident ideas and official voices
- Issues of identity, discipline, and excess
- The ethnicity of pastiche
- “Green” aesthetics and artistic forms
- Critical perspectives on contemporary popular culture

The deadline for submissions is January 8, 2010.

All submissions should include a cover letter that includes your name, phone number, email address, and the title of your essay or book review. All submissions should be approximately 10-15 pages and must be typed in MLA format with a standard 12 pt font. Please do not include your name on the essay itself as it will
be reviewed by a blind peer-review panel. Submissions will not be returned.

Email papers and cover letters as separate Word attachments to: editor@watermarkjournal.com.

You may mail or hand-deliver submissions to the Watermark mailbox:
CSULB Department of English
Attn: Watermark
1250 Bellflower Blvd.
Long Beach, CA 90840

Please direct all questions to: editor@watermarkjournal.com

ACLA (New Orleans, Apr. 1-4, 2010)
Cultures of Migration: Local Cosmopolitanisms
**Deadline extended to Monday, 23 Nov. 2009.

Immigrant communities have often been depicted as either inward-looking, focused on preserving cultural practices from the “old country” or outward-looking, intent on fitting into the new “host” country. In recent years, there has been increasing recognition that “immigrant” communities are often also migrant communities, with complex social and travel networks between their country of origin, their new country of residence and sometimes third and fourth countries where their offspring choose to live. This panel invites papers that investigate how these complex patterns are reflected in creative works of literature, film, theater or music.

Questions to address include, but are not limited to the following. Looking at cultural works, how do immigrant communities place themselves with regard to “home” and “host” nations? How do identities form within and across national borders? How do creative works portray the relations between communities with the same origins but different destinations (e.g. Algerians in London vs. Paris)? How do they identify with immigrants of other ethnic, national or religious backgrounds living in the same space (e.g. Turks, Maghrebis and Asians in French suburbs)? How are these identities transmitted in works of literature, theater, cinema and music? How do national identities play out against local identities (e.g. French or Moroccan vs. identification with a city such as Lyon or Rabat)? How do creative works themselves encourage or impede the transmission of an identity? How do creative works seek to get beyond local or national identifications to declare themselves “citizens of the world”? What are the benefits and costs of such a gesture?

Format of seminar:
This panel will meet on two or three consecutive days (depending on the number of papers), and presenters are strongly encouraged to plan to attend all sessions of the panel. This is a unique conference format that allows a small group of researchers (normally 8-12 people) to pursue a particular topic in depth within the context of a larger conference.

For more information on the conference, please visit the official conference website at http://www.acla.org/acla2010. Please note that paper proposals must be submitted through the conference website at http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php.

Deadline to submit proposals: November 23, 2009

For questions about the panel, please contact the seminar organizers:
Marika Preziuso, Birbeck, University of London (marika.preziuso@googlemail.com)
Annedith Schneider, Sabanci University (schneider@sabanciuniv.edu)

The Vampire in Literature, Culture and Film area of the Popular Culture Association is seeking papers for the Joint National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference to be held Wednesday, March 31st to Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 in St. Louis.

Papers which cover any aspect of the HBO True Blood series or the Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse books are sought for presentation. Papers should be limited to a reading time of 15-20 minutes (3 person panels allow for 20 minute papers while 4 person panels allow for 15 minute papers; panels will be formed no later than January 2010 in order to provide panelists ample time to adjust their presentation time).

If you want to form your own panel of 3 or 4 presenters unified around a particular theme or work, please send panel proposals along with brief abstracts of each paper, each paper’s title, and contact information for each presenter in addition to designating one presenter as the Panel Chair. Discussion panels of 4-6 participants each are also encouraged.

All presenters must be (or become) members of the PCA or ACA and must register for the conference. Membership and registration information will be sent upon presentation acceptance. Please note that paper acceptance obligates participants to present the paper at the conference. Additionally, as per PCA/ACA guidelines, multiple submissions to different areas are not allowed (although you can present a paper and participate as a round-table speaker), and you must be present at the conference to read your own paper.

To have your proposal considered for presentation, please send a 250-350 word abstract by December 15, 2009, complete with your name, affiliation, and contact information to either:

Mary Findley
Vermont Technical College
mfindley@vtc.edu

OR

Patrick McAleer
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
mcaleer_p@yahoo.com

3rd Global Conference
Diasporas - Exploring Critical Issues

Wednesday 7th July – Friday 9th July 2010
Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Papers
This inter- and multi-disciplinary project seeks to explore the contemporary experience of Diasporas – communities who conceive of themselves as a national, ethnic, linguistic or other form of cultural and political construction of collective membership living outside of their ‘home lands.’ In particular, key issues to be addressed include: what are the defining characteristics of Diasporas and what distinguishes one from the other? What role do ‘home’ and ‘host’ cultures play in developing relationships between communities in a global environment? How new is the concept of Diasporas; does it capture new global realities or designate old phenomena in a new way?

The project will also assess the larger context of major world transformations, for example, new forms of migration and the massive movements of people across the globe, as well as the impact and contribution of globalisation on tensions, conflicts and the sense of acceptance, rootedness and membership. Looking to encourage innovative trans-disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations that struggle to understand what it means for people today to have diasporic experiences and a multiplicity of social, political and cultural memberships.

Papers, workshops, presentations and pre-formed panels are invited on any of the following themes:

1. Defining and Grasping the Concept of Diaspora
* What are the criteria, processes and key elements that define a Diaspora?
* Identifying the role of culture and politics; home and host; space and time; centre and periphery; numbers and collective imagination; class, opportunities, money and new communication technologies
* Are all migratory communities Diasporas? What are the significant differences between being a migrant and a member of a diasporic community?
* Has the concept of Diaspora evolved and developed? What have been the latest developments?
* What is shared among Diasporas? What is not shared among Diasporas? Who has access to diasporic membership in home and host contexts?

2. Migration, Settlement and Identity
* What does it mean, today, to belong to a nation, to an ethnic, religious or linguistic group, to a culture and to settle in a place that one does not call home?
* New migratory flows and massive movements from peripheral to central countries and their impact on the formation of Diasporas and the emergence of multiple senses of identity
* Communities on the move, uprootedness and identity. How do identities get preserved?
* Are Diasporas an indication of the possibility of post-national realities or a different way of affirming the place of the nation in our sense of identity?
* How do Diasporas connect to social movements, new rebellion and alternative global politics?
*What distinguishes the diasporic from the post-national, the transnational or the “nationless”?

3. Culture, Belonging and Collective Imaginations
* What are the recent changes in geographical movements, space, home-host conceptions?
* The impact and implication of communication technologies on identity formations and the sense of belonging
* Globalisation and the claims of Diasporas. What are the implications for traditions, language, literature, arts, cinema, television and other forms of representation and cultural production?
* New forms of global exclusion. Who can claim belonging to a Diaspora?
* Sustaining belonging: home, homeland, roots and rootedness, feelings of connectedness or alienation, nostalgia and the need for returning home
* Identity and belonging as destiny and as choice
* Distinctions between inter- and intra-national Diasporas. How does the current critical language of Diaspora take into account the displacement of indigenous communities/nations within the superimposed borders (whether contested or recognized) of other nations? How does the language of Diaspora address the loss of “homeland” that is not a transborder construct “elsewhere”?

4. Instructions and Design
* What are the institutions that allow, maintain and reproduce Diasporas? What are the structures and forces which work against their formation?
* Economic disparities, institutional injustices and the making of diasporic realities. Tensions, contradictions and conflicts – political, economic and cultural forms of citizenship and their place in the Diasporas’ imagination and organization
* The cultural and political context of host countries: acceptance vs xenophobia, fear and ignorance vs openness and knowledge
* Diasporas in the making of social and public policy in host and home countries: remittances and economic dependencies, professions and commodity exchanges, social and cultural interlacing, policies of mutual recognition
* role of the State and divided loyalties

5. Citizenship and Multiculturalism
*What are the methods by which nations integrate Diasporic and other ethnic groups into the host society on the basis of participation in social, economic, and political life?
*What impact does multiculturalism have on Diasporic and migrant communities in terms of their own local and ethnic identity in these host countries?
*With reference to multicultural citizenship in individual countries, what are the mechanisms of influence (and exclusion from such processes of power of certain groups) as this relates to Diasporic communities?
*What are the successes and challenges of multicultural policies and practices globally as a basis for comparing models of integration?
*How does multiculturalism influence various types of participation in a host society? *How is citizenship connected to social, economic, and political participation?
*Does multiculturalism encourage a sense of citizenship, loyalty, and commitment to a host country?
*Is a Diasporic community’s sense of belonging within the host country/community stronger in a multicultural society?
*Are certain Diasporic communities able to access political and rights-based processes more easily than others, and if so, what drivers exist to explain their successes and what barriers exist for other communities?

6. Generational Change, National Consciousness and Identity Formation
*Has generational change impacted on the concept of diaspora?
*In what ways has the concept and discourse of diaspora been modified by the national narrative and consciousness of the generational descendants of diasporic groups?
* How is the concept of diaspora and its related assumptions about ethnicity, homeland and identity formation linked to the policies and practices of hegemonic nation-states? What are the key facets of diaspora that are deployed here?
* Have new generations of diasporic groups begun to question the use of this concept as a term that defines their identity?
* Can diaspora be used to define ‘national’ formations, as opposed to ‘transnational’, ‘non-national’ or ‘anti-national’ configurations?
* Can diaspora be used to describe the changing nature of social identification, in particular the narrative of national ‘rootedness’ and identity of new generations among ethnic minority groups?
*What are the new definitions of homeland, ethnicity and national identity vis-à-vis the generational descendants of diasporic groups?
*Has diaspora reached the limits of its usefulness as a tool for emancipatory politics?

The Steering Group welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 15th January 2010. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 28th May 2010.

300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs
Dr. S. Ram Vemuri
School of Law and Business
Faculty of Law, Business and Arts
Charles Darwin University
Darwin, NT 0909, Australia
E-mail: ram.vemuri@cdu.edu.au

Dr Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR
United Kingdom
E-mail: dias3@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the ‘Diversity and Recognition’ series of research projects, which in turn belong to the At the Interface programmes of ID.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be published in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details about the project please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/diversity-recognition...

For further details about the conference please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/diversity-recognition...

Literature is related to everyday life in a subtle way. Everyday life often manifests itself as the textual Other outside the major narrative thrust, and, therefore, receives scant critical attention in literary studies. In fact everyday life can be seen as an arena of two-way negotiation: it is where power reproduces itself in daily practice, but it is also where both personal and collective creativity intervenes in the reproduction of power. Moreover, everyday life often emerges, becomes visible, or acquires meaning through its engagement with other social categories—gender, race, class, ethnicity, nature, and so on, whose different relations with dominant regimes of power call for different strategies of everyday life practices. Can everyday life be taken as a micro site of resistance to the biopolitical production of social relations and forms of life? How do we conceive aesthetics in a living condition increasingly defined by urbanization, information, media, science, and technology? How do we connect the socio-historical forces of globalization and empire with the mundane details of everyday life practices? In terms of English and American literature, how do we mobilize “everyday life” as a working concept to approach literary texts of all ages, be it Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s drama, 18th-century domestic fiction, Romantic poetry, Thoreau’s writings, or American ethnic literature, to name just a few.
This conference invites abstracts that explore and reflect upon the theories / issues of everyday life within the field of literature in English. Possible topics include but are not restricted to the following:

 *Popular literature and popular culture
 *Life of common people
 *The aesthetics of everyday life
 *Everyday life and religion
 *Gender and the body in everyday life
 *Technology in everyday life
 *Theories/discourses of everyday life
 *Everyday life and ethnic and aboriginal literatures
 *Everyday life and urban writing
 *Modernity, globalization and everyday life
 *Work and livelihood
 *Everyday life and ecological writing
 *Fashion and consumption
 *Leisure, entertainment, and travel

Conference/Paper Language: All the papers need to be written and presented in Chinese or English.
Guidelines for Abstract Submission:
1. The maximum length of the abstract should be limited to one page.
Page 1: title, abstract, and keywords
Page 2: author’s CV in one page (including author’s name, working experience, selected publications, e-mail, phone number, and postal address)
2. Submission via e-mail at: foreign@dragon.nchu.edu.tw (Please put “Abstract for EALA Conference” as the subject).
Submission Details:
1. Full papers: Papers should be no more than 20 pages in length. 2. Paper format: MLA; Paper size: A 4; Font: Times New Roman 12;
Line spacing: 1.5
Important Dates:
Due date for domestic abstract submission: December 20, 2009
Due date for international abstract submission: December 31, 2009 Notification of abstract acceptance: January 15, 2010 Due date for full paper submission: October 25, 2010
Contact:
Mr. James Tsai, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures,
National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan
Tel: 886-4-22840322 ext. 703
E-mail: foreign@dragon.nchu.edu.tw

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION EXTENDED TO 12/7/09

2nd. International Conference on Caribbean Studies (ICCS)

“The Many Caribbean’s and the Bicentennial of the Continental
Spanish American Independence Movements

University of Cartagena, Cloister of St. Augustine
Cartagena de Indias, Colombia
March 15-19, 2010

The main theme emphasizes, but is not thematically limited to the interdisciplinary character of the conference. We suggest additionally the following topics: Theory-critic production from the Caribbean; Regional integration with Latin America; Cultural and literary studies-a transnational experience; Andean/Caribbean socio-cultural dynamics in Colombia; Studies about art, including music and painting. Themes and critical approaches are not limited to these topics.
We will accept only one proposal for paper or panel per each author, in Spanish, English or French. The panels will be composed of a maximum of 4 presentations. Presentations should not exceed twenty minutes; the members of the panels and the session chair will rigorously follow this limit. Please send an abstract of 200 words or less by electronic attachment (Word) to: hrromero@utpa.edu (in English or French) and to figueroa@javeriana.edu.co (in Spanish) by December 7, 2009.
FOR MORE INFORMATION GO TO: www.utpa.edu/dept/modlang;

For further information, please contact: Kevin Sedeño Guillén, E-mail: kesedeno@areandina.edu.co or
Hector R. Romero hrromero@utpa.edu

Call for Papers

International Conference

** CINEMA AND LANDSCAPE**

University of Sheffield
United Kingdom

April 16-18, 2010

Following the publication of a major new edited book in Winter 2009, Cinema and Landscape (Intellect, 2009), featuring essays by notable film scholars from around the world, an international conference is to be held on the subject of cinema and landscape.

The conference will be hosted at the University of Sheffield, April 16-18 2010, with the aim of exploring the intersection between Film, Film Culture, Landscape, Place and Geography.

Proposals** (a 150 word abstract) are very welcome for:

- Single Papers (1 person: 20 minutes + 10 minutes questions) or
- Panels (3 persons: 60 minutes + 30 minutes questions)

Topics could include: landscapes of national cinemas; aesthetics, landscape and film; place, identity and the role of film; geo-political film-scapes; film directors and landscapes; new readings in film geography; landscape and film form; travel, journeys and filmic landscapes . . . And more!

Over two dozen excellent papers to date. The intention is to build on current discussions with the aim of producing further research and publications in this field.

Proposals can be sent to: conference@cinemalandscape.co.uk

Third Call Closing Date: January 31st 2010

**Proposers are encouraged to submit as early as possible**

The conference organisers, Prof. Graeme Harper FRGS & Dr Jonathan Rayner, also very much welcome queries and suggestions on the address above.

Call for Papers:

8th Annual Concordia University Graduate English Colloquium
Communicating Illness: Diagnosing Disordered States

March 19-20th, 2010, Concordia University, Montreal

Abstracts due: January 4, 2010
Submit to: colloquiumconcordia@gmail.com

The 8th Annual Concordia University Graduate English Colloquium, “Communicating Illness: Diagnosing Disordered States,” seeks papers exploring ideas of illness, diagnosis, and interpretations of illness in text, language, and culture. Literature’s engagement with illness has ranged from Keats’ tuberculosis to Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” from Eliot’s depiction of feminine hysteria in The Wasteland to Freud’s mapping of psychosis as a literature of civilization, from sci-fi representations of apocalyptic, global epidemics to Foucault’s diagnosis of 18th century discourses of ‘health’, and from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy to Sontag’s “illness as metaphor.” Illness multiplies, intensifies, and generates meaning, inquiring into the narratives that surround ideas of ‘the human’ and the nature of ‘the subject’.

Among the questions illness puts forward for debate are: How does illness produce literature? How has illness generated poetic, prophetic and theological writing? How do we diagnose and create the “healthy body” in academic departments, and interrogate concepts of civilization and progress in nation states and polities? How is illness used as a tool of ideological domination or coercion, and how does it function as a societal hieroglyph of signification? How is illness deployed as a characterization of decadence, degeneration, weakness, and social dissidence? How is illness used to create representations of difference, and what bearing does this have on our interpretative outlook and our own subjectivity?

Concordia University’s 8th Annual Graduate English Colloquium seeks proposals that discuss illness as a lens or catalyst for examining literature, history, society, the body, sexuality, the psyche, etc., and as a focal site of research, interpretation, and ideological inquiry. Works engaged in a variety of critical methodologies are welcome, including proposals of an interdisciplinary nature.

The Colloquium’s keynote speaker will be Mary Arseneau from the University of Ottawa, whose interdisciplinary work on Victorian women writers investigates literary representations of illness and health, bringing together the fields of literature and medicine.

The deadline for abstracts is January 4th, 2010. Please send abstracts of 300 words or less to colloquiumconcordia@gmail.com, along with a short biographical statement of no more than 50 words. Papers submitted individually, if successful, will be grouped into a panel by the conference organizers. You may also propose a panel topic of your own, provided that three relevant abstracts by different contributors are submitted together.

Possible critical topics or spheres of inquiry include:
- the diagnostic role(s) of literary and social criticism
- medical ethics and politics; medication and treatment (both alternative and medical)
- literary and visual representations of disabilities
- ideologies of contamination and purity, addiction and intervention
- decadence, aging, and degeneration
- trauma, anxiety, neurosis and other psychological disorders
- aestheticization of illness and death; symptoms and other signifiers
- the dying earth, ecocriticism and environmental ills
- disordered affects, passions, emotions
- the politics and poetics of HIV/AIDS
- feminine hysteria and other gendered pathologies
- hygiene and cleanliness; pus/vomit/snot: the abject body
- pathologizations of race, class, gender, and sexuality
- uses and abuses of medical discourse
- hospital culture and popular culture (Grey's Anatomy, ER, etc)

HISTORY MATTERS is a journal whose purpose is to give undergraduates the unique opportunity to be published. Established in 2004, History Matters has received papers from all over the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Australia.

HISTORY MATTERS is published each spring and is edited by undergraduates with the help of a faculty board. The journal consistently publishes about 10% of the submissions, publishing only the papers with high caliber research and writing. Please visit the journal homepage at http://www.historymatters.appstate.edu for more information.

GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION:
Authors may submit papers via e-mail attachment, in Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect formats, to histmatt@appstate.edu. The final deadline is January 29, 2010, but students are encouraged to submit papers as soon as possible. Please include an e-mail address and phone number. The editors welcome any questions at histmatt@appstate.edu.

Association for Asian Performance 10th Annual Conference
August 2, 2010, Los Angeles, CA

The Association for Asian Performance (AAP) invites submissions for its 10th annual conference in Los Angeles, at the Hyatt Century Plaza Hotel, on
August 2, 2010. The AAP conference is a one-day event, preceding the annual ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) conference and held at the ATHE conference hotel.

Proposals are invited for papers, panels, workshops and roundtable discussions. The deadline for proposals is March 15th, 2010.

• Proposals for individual papers should include a brief abstract. Individual presentations should be limited to 20 minutes so that there will be time left for questions and discussion. Visual materials (slides, video etc.) are strongly encouraged.

• Panels should be composed of three paper presenters and one discussant or four paper presenters. Proposals for panels should provide a brief statement that explains the session as a whole and the proposed subject of each paper.

• Roundtables offer an opportunity for participants to discuss a specific theme, issue or significant recent publication. A maximum of six active participants is recommended. While a roundtable proposal will not be as detailed as a panel proposal, it should explain fully the session’s purpose, themes or issues and scope.

• Proposals for workshops by performance practitioner(s) with expertise in specific Asian performance traditions are welcomed, particularly workshops that overlap with a panel theme or paper presentation. Workshop proposals should include an abstract explaining methods and goals. Workshops should be designed to run no longer than 80 minutes.

We encourage suggestions for innovative alternatives to the panels, individual papers and roundtables described above.

Proposals should include the following:

1. Title of panel, roundtable or paper.

2. Names of all the presenters, including chair and/or organizer and discussant (for panels and roundtables.) A few biographical sentences about each presenter.

3. Affiliation, specialization (field/region), mailing address, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of al participants.

4. Explanation of the session (for panels, workshops and roundtables); abstract of each panel presentation or each paper.

Proposals should be emailed to the conference organizer, Claudia Orenstein corenste@hunter.cuny.edu

If you need help locating other scholars to participate in a panel or roundtable, please submit a preliminary description of your proposal before February 1 so we can post it on the AAP website. Alternatively, you can post your suggestions for a panel there directly by logging on to the site at:
http://www.yavanika.org/aaponline/

THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF ALL PROPOSALS IS MARCH 15, 2010.

All presenters are expected to join AAP. Membership is $40 per year ($25 for students) and includes a subscription to the Asian Theatre Journal.

(In)visibility in African Cultures

African Studies Association UK Biennial Conference

16th – 19th September 2010

University of Oxford

"Looking with the eyes only. Idiots can do that. If you look at things that way they’re always separate and you never really see any sense in what you see. It’s all right to look at things that way, separate. It’s relaxing. But after that I always want to see what brings them together so they make sense. Then I understand. Seeing like that makes me happiest." Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers

African art forms, including literature, cinema, theatre and dance, have long been concerned with questioning certain perspectives and offering different ways to approach a varied continent and its many cultures. This stream of the African Studies Association UK conference will examine trends, questions and contradictions around how different aspects of culture become visible – to different viewers, through different lenses – or remain unseen. As the Armah quotation suggests, what will be crucial to our discussion is how these diverse elements intersect and interact.

The general topic of (in)visibility can be grouped into three further sub-themes:

1) Visibility and the Academy

What role is there for the teaching of African cultures in educational establishments, both in the UK and beyond? Is the progress that has been made with introducing more diverse curricula into secondary schools, reflected in university courses and if not, why not? How does the regional grouping of African cultures vie for space with postcolonial framings within the Academy? More widely, which African cultural products are given the most space on the global stage and why?

2) Visibility and the act of representation

Binyavanga Wainana in a satirical article entitled “How to write about Africa” published in Granta magazine, instructs the would-be author to focus on conflict, starvation, the primordial, rolling grasslands, graphic illnesses, dictatorships and beautiful sunsets. Why is it that certain topics remain hypervisible and others ignored? What continues to be spotlighted in twenty-first century studies of ‘Africa’ and are global perceptions gradually changing with time? How is the subjectivity of the viewer, in Africa, the diaspora and beyond, reworked and renegotiated through recent performances and texts?

3) Visibility and aesthetics

Lastly, we turn to what role there is for culture in rendering the invisible visible. Researchers studying topics such as emotion, illness, testimony and memory have repeatedly referred to certain qualities or subjects as unrepresentable. How does art negotiate these areas we find difficult to express? What role is there for the arts in articulating the uncomfortable and saying the unspeakable? Finally, how does literature negotiate the enduringly invisible through tropes such as haunting, absence and loss?

We will seek to address these and many more questions through the input of academics alongside teachers, publishers and artists themselves.

Please send abstracts for 20 minute papers to: visibility2010@googlemail.com by January 18th. Informal enquiries and panel suggestions are also welcome.

This conference stream is being convened by: Charlotte Baker (Lancaster), Zoe Norridge (Oxford) and Elleke Boehmer (Oxford).

Literature is related to everyday life in a subtle way. Everyday life often manifests itself as the textual Other outside the major narrative thrust, and, therefore, receives scant critical attention in literary studies. In fact everyday life can be seen as an arena of two-way negotiation: it is where power reproduces itself in daily practice, but it is also where both personal and collective creativity intervenes in the reproduction of power. Moreover, everyday life often emerges, becomes visible, or acquires meaning through its engagement with other social categories—gender, race, class, ethnicity, nature, and so on, whose different relations with dominant regimes of power call for different strategies of everyday life practices. Can everyday life be taken as a micro site of resistance to the biopolitical production of social relations and forms of life? How do we conceive aesthetics in a living condition increasingly defined by urbanization, information, media, science, and technology? How do we connect the socio-historical forces of globalization and empire with the mundane details of everyday life practices? In terms of English and American literature, how do we mobilize “everyday life” as a working concept to approach literary texts of all ages, be it Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s drama, 18th-century domestic fiction, Romantic poetry, Thoreau’s writings, or American ethnic literature, to name just a few.
This conference invites abstracts that explore and reflect upon the theories / issues of everyday life within the field of literature in English. Possible topics include but are not restricted to the following:

 *Popular literature and popular culture
 *Life of common people
 *The aesthetics of everyday life
 *Everyday life and religion
 *Gender and the body in everyday life
 *Technology in everyday life
 *Theories/discourses of everyday life
 *Everyday life and ethnic and aboriginal literatures
 *Everyday life and urban writing
 *Modernity, globalization and everyday life
 *Work and livelihood
 *Everyday life and ecological writing
 *Fashion and consumption
 *Leisure, entertainment, and travel

Conference/Paper Language: All the papers need to be written and presented in Chinese or English.

Guidelines for Abstract Submission:
1. The maximum length of the abstract should be limited to one page.
Page 1: title, abstract, and keywords
Page 2: author’s CV in one page (including author’s name, working experience, selected publications, e-mail, phone number, and postal address)
2. Submission via e-mail at: foreign@dragon.nchu.edu.tw (Please put “Abstract for EALA Conference” as the subject).
Submission Details:
1. Full papers: Papers should be no more than 20 pages in length. 2. Paper format: MLA; Paper size: A 4; Font: Times New Roman 12;
Line spacing: 1.5
Important Dates:
Due date for domestic abstract submission: December 20, 2009
Due date for international abstract submission: December 31, 2009 Notification of abstract acceptance: January 15, 2010 Due date for full paper submission: October 25, 2010
Contact:
Mr. James Tsai, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures,
National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan
Tel: 886-4-22840322 ext. 703
E-mail: foreign@dragon.nchu.edu.tw

The ACLA’s annual meeting in New Orleans seems an ideal time to address the francophone literatures and cultures of the “New World,” too often considered only as an afterthought in comparative American Studies. This seminar aims to examine francophone cultures both in the U.S. and throughout North America, and the linkages that connect these varied traditions. Papers addressing Louisiana’s French and Creole traditions will be especially welcome, but so will be papers addressing other aspects of "New France": Québecois, Martiniquais, Haitian culture, and their composites (Haitian writers in Montréal, or the rural and urban francophone cultures of the Lower Mississippi, for example). Topics are not limited to the literary: discussions of musical traditions, historical self-fashionings, French-language newspapers, radio programs, and other subjects are also solicited. How might “Accenting the French in Comparative American Studies,” as Mary Jean Green’s recent article proposes doing, alter our understanding of the discipline?

Please submit 250-word proposals by November 23 to the following web address:
http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php

More information about the conference is available here:

http://www.acla.org/acla2010/

The ACLA’s annual conferences have a distinctive structure in which most papers are grouped into twelve-person seminars that meet two hours per day for the three days of the conference to foster extended discussion. Some eight-person (or smaller) seminars meet just the first two days of the conference. This structure allows each participant to be a full member of one seminar, and to sample other seminars during the remaining time blocks. Previous conference programs that show this pattern are available at the ACLA website. The conference also includes plenary sessions, workshops and roundtable discussions, a business meeting, a banquet, and other events. Although you needn't be an ACLA member to propose a paper, you must be a member to present at the conference.

Queer Wales: a collection of essays on sexuality, identity and Wales

In recent years, we have become more aware of the complexity of Welsh identities (national, European, racial, colonial, economic, etc), and a major feature of this complexity is the queering of Welsh history and culture. The sexual identity of Wales is currently being studied, written, performed, legislated, mapped, bought and sold, yet, as far as sexuality is concerned, to what extent is Wales still “The Land of my Fathers” and the “Land of the White Gloves”? At what point may we begin to articulate a coherent LGBTIQ history and community in Wales?

As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains in Epistemology of the Closet,

gay people, who seldom grow up in gay families; who are exposed to their culture’s, if not their parents’, high ambient homophobia long before either they or those who care for them know that they are among those who most urgently need to define themselves against it;…have with difficulty and always belatedly to patch together from fragments a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or resistance. (81)

LGBTIQ people in twentieth-first century Wales are engaged in building just such a “usable heritage” and “politics of survival and resistance,” but this heritage, while it may be belated, need not be patchwork and fragmentary. This interdisciplinary collection of essays seeks to locate a LGBTIQ tradition, culture and community within a history and nation that have been largely hostile to its expression.

This call for papers solicits essays written from a variety of disciplinary approaches on all aspects of gay life and culture, past and present. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

•Policing Welsh sexuality
•Welsh lesbian identities
•Education and sexual identity in Wales
•Gay youth in Wales
•Homophobia in Wales
•Creative industries and urban Welsh queerness
•Wales, sport, and sexual identity
•Rural queer Wales
•Welsh regionalism and sexuality
•Welsh religion and sexuality
•Sex work
•Tourism and sexuality in Wales
•LGBTIQ emigration
•Queerness in the Welsh classroom
•Queer Wales in television and/or film
•Queer Welsh communities
•AIDS and sexual health
•Gay activism in Wales
•Intersections of class and gender in queer Wales
•Queering Welsh masculinity and Welsh nationalism
•Writing the Welsh queer, past and present
•Performing Welsh sexual identity: queer Welsh drama
•Queering the Welsh past
•Sex and sexuality in the Welsh legal system, past and present

Please submit via email (osborne@rmc.ca) abstracts of 500 words along with brief CVs to Huw Osborne, Department of English, Royal Military College of Canada, PO BOX 17000 Station Forces Kingston, Kingston, Ontario, CANADA, K7K 7B4.

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Ugly Betty
The lives of Betty la fea, la fea mas bella

This anthology examines the popular television series that has reached audiences and gained a loyal fan following globally in dubbed or adapted versions of Colombian writer/producer Fernando Gaitán’s original telenovela Yo soy Betty la fea. The collection will raise critical questions about Re/presentation and the ways in which the branded “ugly” woman negotiates subjectivity across borders, literal and imaginary. Questions of class, gender, culture, race, and adaptation and translation will frame the discussions. Various theoretical approaches are welcome, in particular feminist, queer, postmodern, and Cultural Studies. In addition, the anthology will look at current trends in marketing, branding and television broadcasting that have contributed to the global popular culture phenomenon.

Extended abstracts in of 500 words, or completed manuscripts of approximately 5000 to 7500 words due January 7, 2010. All submissions should include a title page with the following information: name, affiliation, phone number(s), mailing and e-mailing addresses; and a brief bio. Review of submissions is on-going. Final manuscripts are due March 1, 2010.

Questions and submissions may be addressed to Laura Valdez-Pagliaro, English Dept. Marymount University, 2807 North Glebe Road, Arlington, VA 22207; 703-284-1577; lvaldezp@marymount.edu.

Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANELS

University of Hertfordshire, UK 16-18th April 2010

The irony of creatures with no reflection becoming such a pervasive reflection of modern culture pleases in a dark way. Since their animation out of folk materials in the nineteenth century, by Polidori, as Varney and in Le Fanu and Stoker, vampires have been continually reborn in modern culture. They have stalked texts from Marx’s image of the leeching capitalist, through Pater’s Lady Lisa of tainted knowledge, to the multifarious incarnations in contemporary fictions in print and on screen. They have enacted a host of anxieties and desires, shifting shape as the culture they are brought to life in itself changes form. More recently, their less charismatic undead cousins, zombies, have been dug up in droves to represent various fears and crises in contemporary culture.

The aim of the conference is to relate the undead in literature, art, and other media to questions concerning gender, technology, consumption, and social change. It will provide an interdisciplinary forum for the development of innovative and creative research and examine these creatures in all their various manifestations and cultural meanings.

Keynote speakers will include
Catherine Spooner, University of Lancaster (Contemporary Gothic, 2006, Routledge Companion to Gothic, 2007)
Dr Stacey Abbott, University of Roehampton (Celluloid Vampires, 2007, Angel, 2009)

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

sexuality and the (living or undead) body
identity politics
Goth culture
new technologies
the metaphor of reflection
celluloid vampires: adaptations and incarnations
teen vampire/zombie fiction
undead TV
blood, money, and circulation
parasitism, production, and consumption
decomposition and decadence
the Undead as Other (nationality, class, gender, etc.)
vampiric art and/or the artist as vampire
Marx and the vampire

Abstracts (200--300 words) for twenty-minute papers as well as proposals for one and a half hour panels should be submitted as an email attachment to Dr Sam George, s.george@herts.ac.uk by December 31st 2009. Abstract should be sent in the following format: Surname as the document title. (1) Title (2) Presenter(s) (3) Institutional affiliation (4) Email (5) Abstract. Panel proposals should include (1) Title of the panel (2) Name and contact information of the chair (3) Abstracts of the presenters. Presenters will be notified of acceptance by the end of January 2010.
For more information, contact Dr Sam George at s.george@herts.ac.uk.

The changing landscape of our discipline can be understood through the work of Emily Apter and Amir Mufti on Auerbach, Spitzer, Said and the figure of the intellectual in exile. The cases of these intellectuals lead one to reconsider what it means to be a comparatist in our cosmopolitan age.

Is the Comparatist the "perfect man" spoken of by Hugo of St. Victor, the figure who erases borders and detaches himself from any notion of home? Is the concept of exile a necessary condition of the Comparatist, permitting the assessment of one’s own culture and those of others? Could the Comparatist or the exiled intellectual become "worlded" through an engagement with various attachments and detachments? Might adopting an "exilic consciousness" contribute to the study of Comparative Literature?

This panel is seeking papers that examine the figure of the intellectual in exile and how this figure can be used to better understand what it means to be a Comparatist today. It also welcomes papers that engage with literature that deals with the figure of the intellectual in exile, and how these texts can also be used to read the ever shifting and changing landscape of Comparative Literature.

This is the ACLA web page where you can view this seminar: http://www.acla.org/acla2010/?p=944
To submit a paper proposal for this seminar, 'Worlded Comparatist:The Intellectual in Exile as Foundation for a New Comparative Literature' please go to http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php . Proposals need to be submitted by November 23, 2009. If you have questions about the seminar, please contact me at evrenakaltun@gmail.com

Call for Papers
Special Issue of MELUS
Guest Editors: Kathryn Nicol and Jennifer Terry

Toni Morrison: New Directions

With the publication of her eighth novel, A Mercy (2008), Toni Morrison has signalled her continuing centrality to the work of imagining and re-imagining American lives, histories, and cultures. A Mercy’s engagement with America’s pasts and futures provides an opportune moment to engage anew with Morrison’s career, to historicize and revise critical paradigms, and to suggest new directions for study. This call for papers invites contributions to a special issue of MELUS dedicated to new work on Toni Morrison. The issue aims to explore fresh approaches to Morrison’s body of work, offer critical readings of the recent fiction, and suggest responses to her non-fiction writing and work in other genres.

We welcome a wide spectrum of responses but topics of particular interest might include:
• Explorations of the author’s recent work (i.e. post-Jazz publications)
• Responses to Morrison’s prefaces and essays, particularly in light of the publication of What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (2008)
• Critical accounts of work in other genres: writing for children, dramatic and operatic works
• Comparative approaches
• New theoretical approaches
• Interdisciplinary and / or ‘non-literary’ approaches
• Morrison as public intellectual and / or Morrison’s self-fashioning
• Studies of the reception of Morrison and / or the responses of different readerships

Completed papers should be between 7000-9000 words, including notes and works cited, and in MLA format. Queries concerning possible submissions as well as book reviews are welcome. Electronic submission is required. Please send an email attachment to Kathryn Nicol (kate_edin@hotmail.com). Deadline for submission: 20 January, 2010.

ROMANIAN CULTURE IN THE GLOBAL AGE

Edited by Rodica Mihaila, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru and Dana Mihailescu
Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press
as part of the project Romanian Cultural Space in Transatlantic Perspective,
Project director: Prof. dr. Rodica Mihaila
CNCSIS grant PN II-ID no. 205/2007

In the Preface to his 1998 collection of essays The Cultures of Globalization, suggestively subtitled Post-Contemporary Interventions, Fredric Jameson describes globalization as a phenomenon that “reflects the sense of an immense enlargement of world communication, as well as of the horizon of a world market, both of which seem far more tangible and immediate than in earlier stages of modernity.” While the underlying force of globalization is the expansion of market economy, with multinational companies and international chains rapidly expanding, and outsourcing becoming the main profit-bouncing strategy, the social (as well as political and cultural) impact of globalization most visibly consists, in Anthony Giddens’ words in The Consequences of Modernity (1990) of “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.”
By 2005, in Arjun Appadurai’s view as expressed in an article in his edited volume entitled simply Globalization, globalization had become a phenomenon with such wide implications that it had come to be perceived as a source of anxiety in the U. S. academic world (which has always led the theorizing discourse around the concept, given the American origin of the phenomenon), mainly due to the difficulty to conceptualize a “world without borders.” Postcolonial critics – such as Sankaran Krishna in Globalization and Postcolonialism, 2008 – show worry as globalization, initially perceived as an effective decolonization strategy, has posed real neocolonizing threats in more recent years as the world economic system has promoted exploitation of cheaper labor force in formerly colonized countries. This threat is certainly expanding in postcommunist Eastern Europe and has increased with EU accession and the easier circulation of labor force. If this intensification of communication at a distance, facilitated by the spectacular development of the Internet, was beginning to change Jameson’s “post-contemporary” world as early as the nineties, Eastern Europe – which in the nineties was struggling with the hardest phase of post-communist transition to a real market economy, with consequences that have still not entirely overcome the stage of savage capitalism – actually started to be part of the global world only after 2000, when EU accession became a valid promise and then a fact.
Romanian Culture in the Global Age is an edited collection of essays which investigates the relationship between the forces of globalization and Romania’s post-communist and post-accession situation. The collection attempts to answer the following questions: How does this increasingly fast flow of information and long-distance communication affect a country like Romania, whose visibility has increased dramatically since the country has been more part of the contemporary global world as a result of NATO and EU accession? How has the awareness of being part of the global world and participating in its current debates changed the way in which Romanian culture imagines and reinvents itself as it becomes increasingly freer from the mental manacles bequeathed by the communist regime, whose presence still makes itself felt in everyday life? How does the local/global dialectic intrinsic to the global world affect the re-shaping of a Romanian cultural identity?

We invite submissions of 4000-5000-word articles for possible publication in the volume along (but not limited to) the following topics:

- Romanian academia and the globalization debate
- Romania between postcommunism, postcolonialism and the global world
- Romanian literature and film as spaces of reflection for the country’s increased visibility in today’s global world
- The culture of the Romanian diaspora (with an emphasis on, but not limited to, the Romanian American diaspora)
- The role of print media and the Internet in encouraging the fast flow of information and communication between Romania and the world
- Romanian labor force in the global world as reflected in the media, literature and film
- Romanian cultural institutions and the promotion of Romanian culture abroad
- Global/glocal effects of EU accession as seen from Romania

Please send 4000-5000 contributions accompanied by a 200-word abstract and a 100-word biographical note with details regarding your affiliation and professional career to romanianculture1@yahoo.com by December 15, 2009. Papers should use MLA citation style, see details below.
Please use the spell check, the grammar check, and make all necessary corrections before you submit your contribution. We are sorry we will not be able to accept for publication those contributions that do not comply with all these requirements.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDITING
1. Papers should be edited in Times New Roman 12, 1.5 spacing, justified, first line indented 1.25 cm.
2. Quotations exceeding 2 lines should be typed in a paragraph indented 1.7 cm, justified, Times New Roman 10, single spaced.
3. Papers should be written in concordance with the current MLA Citation Style, using in-text citation and the WORKS CITED system:
a. After a quote in the body of your paper, indicate the source in brackets, using the format specified below as the In-Text Citation form.
b. At the end of the paper, list all the works used, in alphabetical order, under the title Works Cited, using the format specified below as the Works Cited Form.
4. Footnotes containing supplementary information may be included, using Font Size 10. Please do not include editorial data in the footnotes; use only in-text citations.
5. Title of the article: capitals, italics; followed by the author’s name, in small letters, italics.
6. We are sorry we can accept no more than 2 photos per article. They should be saved in the .jpeg format.

Guidelines for MLA Citation Style (Based on the MLA Handbook, 5th Edition)

Type of Entry In-Text Citation Form Works Cited Form
Book. Single Author (Keyser 75). Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1993.
Book. Two or Three Authors (Blocker, Plummer,
and Richardson 52-57). Blocker, Clyde E., Robert H. Plummer, and Richard C. Richardson, Jr. The Two-Year College: A Social Synthesis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1965.
NOTE: If there are more than three authors, name only the first and add et al. or name each author.
No Author Given (A Handbook of Korea
241-47). A Handbook of Korea. 4th ed. Seoul: Korean Overseas Information Service, Ministry of Culture and Information, 1982.
Author's Work in an Anthology (Auerbach 10). Auerbach, Nina. "Jane Austen and Romantic Imprisonment." Jane Austen in a Social Context. Ed. David Monaghan. Totowa, NJ: Barnes, 1981. 9-27.
A Multivolume Work (Daiches 2: 538-39). Daiches, David. A Critical History of English Literature. 2nd ed. 2 vols. New York: Ronald, 1970.
Edition Other Than the First (Chaucer 545). Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. F.N. Robinson. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1957.
A Republished Book (Doctorow 209-12). Doctorow, E.L. Welcome to Hard Times. 1960. New York: Bantam, 1976.
A Book in a Series (Reiman 113). Reiman, Donald H. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Updated ed. Twayne's English Authors Series. 81. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
An Article in a "Familiar" Reference Book ("Wasatch Range"). "Wasatch Range." Encyclopedia Americana. 1993 ed.
Article in a Journal (Spear 94). Spear, Karen. "Building Cognitive Skills in Basic Writers." Teaching English in the Two-Year College 9 (1983): 91-98.
Article from a Weekly or Biweekly Magazine (Gleick 33). Gleick, Elizabeth. "Sex, Betrayal and Murder." Time 17 July 1995: 32-33+.
Article from a Monthly or Bimonthly Magazine (Snyder 68). Snyder, Mark. "Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes." Psychology Today July 1982: 60-68.
Article from a Newspaper (Jereski C1). Jereski, Laura. "Entertainment Stocks: Is a Boffo Performance Over?" Wall Street Journal 1 Aug. 1995, eastern ed.: C1+.
Film Review (Harrington D1). Harrington, Richard. "Under Siege 2: Railroad Ruckus." Rev. of Under Siege 2. Washington Post 15 July 1995: D1+.
Interview (Morganis). Morganis, Nancy. Telephone Interview. 8 Aug. 1995.
Television program ("Debate on Welfare
Reform"). "Debate on Welfare Reform." Face the Nation. CBS. 6 Aug. 1995.
Electronic Source: Document Within Online Scholarly Project ("Kosovo"). "Kosovo." Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. 13 Sept. 1999
.
Electronic Source: Personal or Professional Site (Maxwell Library Home
Page). Maxwell Library Home Page. 3 Aug. 1999. Clement C. Maxwell Library,
Bridgewater State College. 13 Sept. 1999
.
Electronic Source: Article in Online Periodical (Hixon 2). Hixon, Allen L. "Preventing Street Gang Violence." American Family Physician 59.8 (April 1999): 4 pp. 3 Aug 1999

Call for Papers ROMANIAN CULTURE IN THE GLOBAL AGE
Edited by Rodica Mihaila, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru and Dana Mihailescu. Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, as part of the project Romanian Cultural Space in Transatlantic Perspective,
Project director: Prof. dr. Rodica Mihaila
CNCSIS grant PN II-ID no. 205/2007

In the Preface to his 1998 collection of essays The Cultures of Globalization, suggestively subtitled Post-Contemporary Interventions, Fredric Jameson describes globalization as a phenomenon that “reflects the sense of an immense enlargement of world communication, as well as of the horizon of a world market, both of which seem far more tangible and immediate than in earlier stages of modernity.” While the underlying force of globalization is the expansion of market economy, with multinational companies and international chains rapidly expanding, and outsourcing becoming the main profit-bouncing strategy, the social (as well as political and cultural) impact of globalization most visibly consists, in Anthony Giddens’ words in The Consequences of Modernity (1990) of “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.”
By 2005, in Arjun Appadurai’s view as expressed in an article in his edited volume entitled simply Globalization, globalization had become a phenomenon with such wide implications that it had come to be perceived as a source of anxiety in the U. S. academic world (which has always led the theorizing discourse around the concept, given the American origin of the phenomenon), mainly due to the difficulty to conceptualize a “world without borders.” Postcolonial critics – such as Sankaran Krishna in Globalization and Postcolonialism, 2008 – show worry as globalization, initially perceived as an effective decolonization strategy, has posed real neocolonizing threats in more recent years as the world economic system has promoted exploitation of cheaper labor force in formerly colonized countries. This threat is certainly expanding in postcommunist Eastern Europe and has increased with EU accession and the easier circulation of labor force. If this intensification of communication at a distance, facilitated by the spectacular development of the Internet, was beginning to change Jameson’s “post-contemporary” world as early as the nineties, Eastern Europe – which in the nineties was struggling with the hardest phase of post-communist transition to a real market economy, with consequences that have still not entirely overcome the stage of savage capitalism – actually started to be part of the global world only after 2000, when EU accession became a valid promise and then a fact.
Romanian Culture in the Global Age is an edited collection of essays which investigates the relationship between the forces of globalization and Romania’s post-communist and post-accession situation. The collection attempts to answer the following questions: How does this increasingly fast flow of information and long-distance communication affect a country like Romania, whose visibility has increased dramatically since the country has been more part of the contemporary global world as a result of NATO and EU accession? How has the awareness of being part of the global world and participating in its current debates changed the way in which Romanian culture imagines and reinvents itself as it becomes increasingly freer from the mental manacles bequeathed by the communist regime, whose presence still makes itself felt in everyday life? How does the local/global dialectic intrinsic to the global world affect the re-shaping of a Romanian cultural identity?

We invite submissions of 4000-5000-word articles for possible publication in the volume along (but not limited to) the following topics:

- Romanian academia and the globalization debate
- Romania between postcommunism, postcolonialism and the global world
- Romanian literature and film as spaces of reflection for the country’s increased visibility in today’s global world
- The culture of the Romanian diaspora (with an emphasis on, but not limited to, the Romanian American diaspora)
- The role of print media and the Internet in encouraging the fast flow of information and communication between Romania and the world
- Romanian labor force in the global world as reflected in the media, literature and film
- Romanian cultural institutions and the promotion of Romanian culture abroad
- Global/glocal effects of EU accession as seen from Romania

Please send 4000-5000 contributions accompanied by a 200-word abstract and a 100-word biographical note with details regarding your affiliation and professional career to romanianculture1@yahoo.com by December 15, 2009. Papers should use MLA citation style, see details below.
Please use the spell check, the grammar check, and make all necessary corrections before you submit your contribution. We are sorry we will not be able to accept for publication those contributions that do not comply with all these requirements.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDITING
1. Papers should be edited in Times New Roman 12, 1.5 spacing, justified, first line indented 1.25 cm.
2. Quotations exceeding 2 lines should be typed in a paragraph indented 1.7 cm, justified, Times New Roman 10, single spaced.
3. Papers should be written in concordance with the current MLA Citation Style, using in-text citation and the WORKS CITED system:
a. After a quote in the body of your paper, indicate the source in brackets, using the format specified below as the In-Text Citation form.
b. At the end of the paper, list all the works used, in alphabetical order, under the title Works Cited, using the format specified below as the Works Cited Form.
4. Footnotes containing supplementary information may be included, using Font Size 10. Please do not include editorial data in the footnotes; use only in-text citations.
5. Title of the article: capitals, italics; followed by the author’s name, in small letters, italics.
6. We are sorry we can accept no more than 2 photos per article. They should be saved in the .jpeg format.

EGSA Conference: The 20th Annual Mardi Gras Conference at Louisiana State University

Regarding Iteration: Narratives of Imitation and Innovation

February 11-12, 2010

Location: Baton Rouge, LA

Keynote Address by Brian McHale, Ohio State University

Special Session: (Re)Modeling Our Others: Draculas, Jasons, Michaels, and Freddies

Likened to television’s relatively recent inundation by home remodeling and design programs over the last ten years is an increasingly popular direction by filmmakers towards renovating our highly recognizable, but slowly aging monster franchises—classic models like Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)—with a new re-envisaged generation of monster progeny, like Friday the 13th (2009), and Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009); and now in the works for 2010 are New Line Cinema’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, starring Jackie Earle Haley as the new “Freddy,” as well as a screen version of Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s novel, Dracula The Un-Dead (Dutton, October 2009), the official sequel to Dracula (1897) authorized by the Stoker family estate.

The theoretical scope of this topical area invites papers treating these and other shifting representations of the monstrous; recent evolutionary patterns in mainstream, as well as minor, horror and science fiction narratives; and/or the tensioning of conservative and progressive elements in the representationality of monstrosity and “deviance,” a relationship that has figured prominently in the attempt(s) of many to work through collective anxieties, traumas, or aspirations, which, for our purposes, can be mapped out using visible artifacts such as film or television.

Papers examining these issues are only a small sampling of the array of topics that may be explored by presenters. Please send abstract proposals to John Edgar Browning at jbrow11@lsu.edu for consideration.

General information on the conference can be found at http://mardigras2010.blogspot.com/

CALL FOR PAPERS: Shane Meadows day event, University of East Anglia, April 2010 (date and venue to follow)

Since the attention-grabbing short film Smalltime (1996) and his debut feature TwentyFourSeven (1997), director Shane Meadows has emerged as arguably the most distinctive young filmmaker in contemporary British cinema. Following the critical and commercial success of This is England (2007) - soon to be developed into a TV series by Channel Four - Meadows has continued his project of providing the forgotten communities and anonymous spaces of provincial England with a singular cinematic voice. Having attracted only limited scholarly attention thus far, the time is ripe for a comprehensive overview of Meadows’ oeuvre.

We seek original 20 minute papers for an event devoted to Meadows’ output and his place within contemporary British film and television, and we plan to publish selected papers as an edited collection.

Topics could include (but are certainly not limited to):

- Representations of gender (particularly masculinity, but also the possible marginalisation of women in Meadows’ films)
- Class and marginal communities/lifestyles
- Race / ethnicity
- Meadows and auteurism
- Regionalism / parochialism
- English-ness / British-ness
- Fatherhood as structuring motif in Meadows’ work
- Comedy and the function of humour in Meadows’ oeuvre (comparisons with class-based/regional humour of Peter Kay and Shameless, for example)
- Meadows’ films and their relationship to the social-realist tradition
- Representations of the family
- Meadows’ short films
- Meadows’ TV work, including the Shane’s World series for Channel 4
- Acting / performance / improvisation in Meadows’ films (e.g. professional vs. non-professional performers)
- Representation of children / youth
- Nostalgia / the 1980s
- Dialogue / dialect
- Depictions of urban and rural landscape
- Meadows and genre
- Critical / popular reception of Meadows’ work
- Meadows’ ‘independence’ and his relationship to contemporary British cinema / association with Warp records / funding
- Music in Meadows’ films
- Meadows’ use of digital technology / DIY aesthetic / filmmaking practice
- His influences and intertexts

Please send 300-word abstracts to Sarah Godfrey (s.godfrey@uea.ac.uk) by 31 January 2010.

The Valley Humanities Review is currently seeking essays in the humanities for publication in its Spring 2010 Issue. We seek essays of high quality, intellectual rigor and originality that challenge or contribute substantially to ongoing conversations in the humanities. Topics may include but are not limited to: literature, history, religion, philosophy, art, art history and foreign languages. VHR is also currently seeking poetry submissions; students may submit up to three poems. VHR is committed to undergraduate research and scholarship in the field; therefore, we only accept submissions by current or recently graduated undergraduate students. Our reading period runs from September 1 to December 15 of each year. All submissions received outside of these dates will be returned unread. All submissions should adhere to the Chicago style in formatting, footnoting and bibliography. Essays should be between 3,000 and 6,000 words in length, be free of errors and have an original title. Submissions may be emailed to submissions-vhr@lvc.edu. Please visit www.lvc.edu/vhr for more information.

The “breakage” of language, and the breakdown of communication that may ensue from this breakage, marks the borderlines between personal, social and cultural difference, but the defamiliarization and fragmentation of the self that this breakage may effect can also produce new visions of the self/other relationship and new communicative possibilities. The poet John Hollander begins a poem with the line, “nothing makes something happen.” Language’s failures and silences have been used as a starting place for epistemological possibility and recovery in literature from pre- to post-modernity, and are a main emphasis of writers as diverse as George Herbert, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Dionne Brand, and Judith Butler. While the failures of language are indicative of a loss of sanity in Woolf’s work, Butler uses discursive failure as a starting point to establish a community based on a shared precariousness and vulnerability. Each of these writers is concerned with the relationship between subjectivity and language and with the breaking of language in order to render it useful to a project of producing a new subject position. Do hybridizations, creolizations, disruptions, interruptions and breakages of language enable new articulations of subjectivity? Or does the breakdown of language lead to a loss of identity and selfhood? What are the necessary linguistic reformations of the self that come with such a breakage? Should we consider the breakage of language as a fatality of which we are mere passive victims or as an empowering act to effect new articulations of the self? This panel aims to explore the connection between a poetic desire to break language in the interest of understanding the relationship between the interior and exterior of both language and subjectivity.

PLEASE SUBMIT ABSTRACT DIRECTLY TO ME OR TO THE ACLA CONFERENCE SITE.

Conference website: http://www.acla.org/acla2010