category: ethnicity and national identity

Assimilation & Vice in American Literature, NeMLA Convention, Harrisburg, PA (April 3-6, 2014)

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:45:55 -0400

We typically think and speak of assimilation not only as a process that results in cultural hybridity but as a process accomplished through hard work and sacrifice. But what role does vice play in this assimilation narrative? Moreover, what do forms of vice tell us about the time period from which the author writes? In speaking of 'vice,' we will not limit ourselves to criminal acts (although we will not exclude these, either); rather, we will also speak of the narrative functionality and potentiality of activities like dancing, gambling, alcohol consumption, and adultery in assimilation stories.
Please send 250-300 word abstracts to Francisco.Delgado@stonybrook.edu.

Deadline: September 30, 2013

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

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

NeMLA 2014: Post-9/11 Narratives of American Im/Emigration

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:49:29 -0400

POST-9/11 NARRATIVES OF AMERICAN IM/EMIGRATION

45th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 3-6, 2014
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Host: Susquehanna University

How is the reality of post-9/11 America being captured in contemporary immigrant stories? Are contemporary authors telling stories of American immigration, exile, or both simultaneously? This panel seeks to elucidate the ways in which 9/11 and its lingering aftermath is figured in recent immigrant fiction while examining themes and trends emerging in this growing body of literature. Please send inquiries or 250-500 word abstracts (preferably MSWord or PDF attachments) to Katie Daily-Bruckner, dailym@bc.edu.

Deadline: September 30, 2013
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

The 2014 NeMLA convention continues the Association's tradition of sharing innovative scholarship in an engaging and generative location. This capitol city set on the Susquehanna River is known for its vibrant restaurant scene, historical sites, the National Civil War museum, and nearby Amish Country, antique shops and Hershey Park. NeMLA has arranged low hotel rates of $104-$124.

The 2014 event will include guest speakers, literary readings, professional events, and workshops. A reading by George Saunders will open the Convention. His 2013 collection of short fiction, The Tenth of December, has been acclaimed by the New York Times as: “the best book you’ll read this year.” NeMLA’s Keynote Speaker will be David Staller, Producer and Director of Project Shaw. Mr. Staller presents monthly script-in-hand performances of Bernard Shaw’s plays at the Players Club in New York City.

[UPDATE] “Making Meaning at the End of the World: Apocalyptic Texts” SAMLA Nov. 8-10 Abstracts by 6/7

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:14:37 -0400

SAMLA Convention 2013
November 8-10, 2012
Marriott Atlanta Buckhead Hotel
Atlanta, Georgia 2013

“Making Meaning at the End of the World: Apocalyptic Texts”
Chair: Lynne Simpson, Presbyterian College
Affiliated Group: College English Association

As R.E.M., that great band from Athens, Georgia, famously sang, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” What is driving our current American obsession with the apocalypse? Papers that explore imagined endings from environmental disasters to zombie invasions are welcome. What do apocalyptic literature, television, and film mean for us culturally, and what might we discern from these often cautionary tales? Please send abstracts of around 500 words to Lynne Simpson at lsimpson@presby.edu by June 7.

From Science to Sensation: Art and Artifice in Wilkie Collins

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:43:29 -0400

From Science to Sensation: Art and Artifice in Wilkie Collins (MMLA November 7-10 2013)

A special session on the relation between science and sensation in the work of Wilkie Collins at the Midwest Modern Language Association 2013 conference that focuses on the theme of Art and Artifice.

Accused of such literary crimes as sensationalism and dilettantism, Collins is too often dismissed as a writer of lighter fare, passed over for studies of the period's more serious writers - like Dickens, for instance, with whom he worked closely as a journalist for Household Words and as a a dramatist. This session puts Collins and his work in the critical spotlight, looking from an interdisplinary perspective at how Collins's writing explored deeper social issues - marriage, sexuality, ethics and science, to name but a few - while catering to his audience's taste for art and artifice.

We are particularly interested in papers that explore Collins's writing that receives less critical attention.

Deadline for abstracts June 14, 2013

Please submit a 300-word proposal and a brief bio to
Professors Elizabeth Anderman and Erika Behrisch Elce:

Erika.Behrisch.Elce@rmc.ca
Elizabeth.Anderman@Colorado.edu

CFP--2014 EAAS Conference Workshop: Food on the Home Front, Food on the Warfront: Conflict and the American Diet

Tue, 21 May 2013 03:36:43 -0400

Food has been an inextricable part of American warfare since the inception of the nation. From the traveling cooks of the Revolutionary War, to the advent of canned provisions during the Civil War, to the renaming of German dishes such as sauerkraut (liberty cabbage) and hamburgers (liberty steaks) during World War I, to the rise of Asian cuisine during World War II and the Vietnam War, to the surge of Middle Eastern cuisine and the French fries/freedom fries controversy of the post 9/11 era, military conflict has impacted the American diet both on the warfront and on the home front. While international politics and domestic propaganda ostensibly initiated and sustained many of these dietary changes, some outlasted the wars with which they were originally associated, becoming a permanent part of American culinary culture. The consumption of canned food, for example, was originally designed for soldiers and travelers who could not always access a fresh cooked meal. Canned food was then sold to middle class consumers as luxury items which would facilitate their busy lifestyles. After World War II, however, canned food was democratized through mass production, becoming a generic and inexpensive part of American life. Today, it is a significant part of the national palate, spawning entire industries (tuna) and foodways (spam cuisine).

War has also prompted Americans to rethink their consumption of food, ranging from the improvement of domestic beer brewing (when patriotic Americans refused to consume German beer); to the conservation and home gardening movements of World Wars I and II; to more recent efforts centering on organic and green consumption after Americans witnessed what chemicals could do to the human body during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. Food has also served as points of contention between war-torn nations, with Hershey Bars and Coca Cola functioning first as soft power or cultural “envoys of peace,” and later as insidious portents of the American capitalism and imperialism that many associate with “hard power” US global interventions.

This workshop, which is part of the 2014 EAAS Conference at the Hague (Netherlands, April 3-6), seeks to explore the meaning of food in relation to the conference theme of American conflict and war. The workshop chairs encourage the submission of paper proposals dealing with the ways in which war has impacted American foodways and culinary culture since the eighteenth century. We are especially interested in submissions that consider material objects such as menus, posters, food packaging, recipes and cookbooks as well as media representations, including pamphlets, short films, and public service announcements produced by the US government, related agencies, and NGOs. Topics may include, but are not limited to: representations of food and war in American literature; war and the scarcity of food; food conservation movements and grassroots activism; home production and canning; gender, class, race and food; the evolution of the American diet; culinary creativity, food substitutions, and changes in cooking style; the American consumer and shopping habits; food, war, and children; propaganda and patriotism; cooking classes, textbooks and indoctrination; food rationing and hoarding; nutrition during wartime; and comparative/transnational approaches.

Paper proposals (abstracts of no more than 500 words) and one-paragraph bios should be emailed to both workshop chairs by October 1, 2013.

In order to present at the conference, membership in EAAS, or one of its affiliates, is required. Unfortunately, late submissions cannot be considered. Limited travel funds will be available for individuals with accepted abstracts.

Dr. Tanfer Emin Tunc (tanfer@hacettepe.edu.tr)
Dr. Annessa Ann Babic (annessababic@gmail.com)
www.eaas.eu

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations - Call for Papers!

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:18:43 -0400

The State of the State of Jefferson

This special edition of the Humboldt Journal of Social Relations (HJSR) explores contemporary issues pertinent to communities of northern California and southern Oregon, investigating a range of themes common to the mythical State of Jefferson. The issue welcomes university-affiliated submissions, including those from graduate and undergraduate students, as well as submissions from beyond the Humboldt State University research community. Submissions are due on September 15th, 2013. Proposed topics include the following:
1. The social impacts of economic transition
2. Regional identity and politics
3. Land use policy and environmental issues
4. Open submissions on social, economic, political, and/or cultural issues pertinent to the region

The editor will provide an overview of the State of Jefferson, including a discussion of the changing social and political circumstances that have conditioned how this area of northern California and southern Oregon has been understood and imagined over time, along with a conceptual-theoretical framework within which to consider regions and regionalism.

Authorship: All authors are encouraged to collaborate with others inside or outside academia. Interdisciplinary submissions are welcome.

Manuscript Submission:
1. Manuscripts should be in 12 point font, double spaced, and generally not exceed 8500 words. To facilitate blind review, authors should incorporate a cover page that includes an article title, author contact information, a 75 word or less biographical statement, and a 150 word or less abstract. Format citations, tables, figures, and references using American Psychological Association style.
2. Email hjsr@humboldt.edu with the message subject “HJSR: Jefferson Submission,” and attach your submission in .doc, docx or .rtf format.
3. Via overland mail send a check for $15 made out to “HJSR” including a note with your contact information and the date on which you sent your electronic submission.
4. Submission implies commitment to publish in HJSR. Authors should not simultaneously submit to another journal. Manuscripts should not have been published elsewhere.

Editor
Matthew Derrick
Department of Geography
Humboldt State University

Managing Co-Editors
Rebecca Batzel
Department of Geography
Humboldt State University

Alexis Grant
Department of Sociology
Humboldt State University

Atwood's Apocalyptic Visions (8/1/13)

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:39:07 -0400

Cambridge Scholars Publishing has expressed interest in a collection on Margaret Atwood and the theme of the apocalypse (though the collection is not yet under contract).

Please send abstracts of 500-600 words (or completed essays) to Karma Waltonen (kjwaltonen@ucdavis.edu) by August 1, 2013.

(The last novel in the MaddAddam series will debut in September. This book focuses primarily on the story of Adam One and Zeb and resolves the problems of painballer and pigoon threats to the surviving humans and Crakers. Abstracts about what you assume will be the lens through which you read this novel/the trilogy will be considered.)

Arrested Development (7/15/13 for PCA/ACA, Chicago, April 2014)

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:59:51 -0400

I am seeking panelists for a proposed session on Arrested Development at the 2014 PCA/ACA Conference in Chicago (April 16-19). Final approval for the panel will come from the TV area chair. If I receive enough interest/proposals, I will also consider submitting a book proposal for the first edited collection on the show. Please indicate in your email if you're interested in the panel, the book, or both.

Topics for essays include, but are not limited to:
Class
Family Dynamics
Work Issues
The 1%/Occupy Wallstreet
The Cult Status of the Show
Sexuality
Gender
Narratology
Psychology
Economics
Criminal Justice
Illusions
Identity/Agency

Please submit an abstract of 300-500 words and a brief bio to Karma Waltonen (kjwaltonen@ucdavis.edu) by July 15th, 2013.

Special Issue: Feminisms, Academia, Austerity

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:24:11 -0400

JOURNAL OF GENDER STUDIES
Special Issue 2014: Call for Papers

‘Feminisms, Academia, Austerity’
Guest Editors: Helen Davies and Claire O’Callaghan
(JGS Editor: Blu Tirohl)
The current age of austerity is posing significant challenges to feminist scholarship within academia. Recent government funding cuts to higher education are jeopardising the future of research in the arts and humanities more broadly, but the decline of centres, institutes and courses devoted to gender and women’s studies has the potential to threaten the future of feminism in the academy. Retirements and redundancies may signal the end of feminist teaching and research in certain higher education institutions. The dearth of employment opportunities for postgraduates and early career researchers has the potential to elide the next generation of feminist scholars. The increasingly competitive environment of employment in higher education is generating divisions and inequalities which put pressure upon the networks of support, co-operation and community which have been integral to feminist research, teaching and practice
This special issue of the Journal of Gender Studies, ‘Feminisms, Academia, Austerity’, provides a multi-disciplinary space to critically investigate such concerns from a range of perspectives. In what ways are these changes affecting our work and lives? What potential is there to resist these narratives of decline? How might feminist teaching, research, theory and activism engage with and combat such challenges? The guest editors invite articles of 5000-7000 words in length which might address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
• The impact of the age of austerity upon women’s and feminist writing, art, performance, scholarship, theory, teaching and activism;
• Resistance to narratives of decline in the age of austerity;
• The challenges posed to ‘sisterhood’ in the current academic environment;
• Bridging the gap between postgraduate/early career feminist researchers and established scholars;
• Postcolonial, queer, and/or differently abled responses to the age of austerity in feminist research;
• Historical, political and sociological responses to the age of austerity in feminist research;
• Exploring alternative futures for feminism in the academy;
• Strategies of resistance to the marginalisation of feminist research;
• Encouraging the next generation of feminist scholars.

The deadline for submissions is 30th June 2013. Please see the Journal of Gender Studies’ guidance for authors at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjgs20/current
If you have any queries, please contact Helen Davies (Helen.Davies@tees.ac.uk) and Claire O’Callaghan (cfo3@le.ac.uk)

[UPDATE: Deadline Approaching]

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:20:38 -0400

CFP: Media Spaces of Gender and Sexuality
Media Fields Journal
University of California, Santa Barbara

This issue of Media Fields investigates the connections between media, space, gender, and sexuality, seeking conversations that center on these interrelations and negotiations. We invite papers that raise questions of how media spaces construct gender, and how gender, in turn, constructs media spaces; how spaces condition and are conditioned by gender performances and sexual practices; and how gender legibility limits (or allows) access to various media spaces.

Film and media scholarship historically came of age through its study of the relationship between gender, sexuality, and media. Much has been written about the status of women as objects of the cinematic gaze, as well as about the status of female and queer-identified subjects as media producers. Yet in more recent times, issues of gender and sexuality have once again become marginalized in academic discourse, revealing the need for new explorations that coincide with the impact of the “spatial turn.” In this age of conflict, dissent, surveillance, and migration—when the study of media is often also the study of the precariousness and dynamism of the spatial—it is particularly important to trace the interconnections between space, media, and gender.

We are inspired by the work of those film and media scholars who have explored such interconnections. Lynn Spigel’s seminal book on the gendered discourse surrounding domestic television viewing provides us with one useful example, as does Lucas Hilderbrand’s forthcoming work on the culture of gay bars after Stonewall. While some scholars like Spigel and Hilderbrand have studied the connections between gender, space, and media in their own work, fewer media studies journals have made this topic a primary focus. As a result, we seek scholarship that deals with space in a range of ways: essays might discuss online spaces that allow for specific negotiations of gender or sexuality, or with gender embodiment in physical spaces of various scales, from the very local (the living room, for example) to the global.

Essays might also draw upon feminist interventions into Marxist/historical materialist theories of space, as well as engaging the intersections between gender, race, and class. These important intersections exceed the label, “identity politics”—a label that we feel is now often deployed in order to debunk the continued relevance of gender and sexuality to any scholarly conversation. While we do indeed call for political approaches to gender and space—essays informed by the agendas of feminist and queer activism—we stress that gender and sexuality are not merely areas of special interest, but are instead structuring principles of discrimination that permeate our lives on a number of registers.

Thus, our approach is multivalent. We invite submissions that consider this complexity, possibly addressing the following topics:

--Transnational Queer and Feminist Media: How are flows of bodies, labor, capital, and images gendered and sexualized?

--Queering Questions of Scale: How does heterosexism delimit notions of nation, state, and the transnational?

--Gendered Spaces of Conflict and Dissent: How do media contribute to the gendering of the different spaces of war and dissent as well as of the subjects who are involved?

--Gender, Sexuality, and Online Spaces: How are social media practices and spaces gendered and sexualized?

--Queer/Feminist Gaming: representations of gendered and sexualized spaces in mainstream video games, gendered geographies of video game production, gendered spaces of gaming culture

--Spaces of Surveillance: How is surveillance fundamentally gendered, sexualized, and spatialized? How does voyeurism continue to bolster certain experiences of space and place?

--Gendered Infrastructures: How are media infrastructures gendered, and why does this matter?

--Gender, Sexuality and Access: How do gender and its legibility (e.g., normativity) result in certain types of access to particular spaces?

We are looking for essays of 1500-2500 words, digital art projects, and audio or video interviews exploring the relationship between gender, sexuality, and space. We encourage approaches to this topic from scholars in cinema and media studies, anthropology, architecture, art and art history, communication, ecology, geography, literature, musicology, sociology, and other relevant fields.

Feel free to contact issue co-editors, Hannah Goodwin and Lindsay Palmer, with proposals and inquiries.
Email submissions to submissions@mediafieldsjournal.org by May 30th, 2013.

The Marginalised Mainstream: Fading and Emerging NEW DEADLINE

Mon, 20 May 2013 05:06:55 -0400

Second Annual Marginalised Mainstream Conference: Fading and Emerging, 12-13 September 2013 NEW DEADLINE: 31 May 2013

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

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

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

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

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

• Fictional traces
• Revelations/concealment
• Dawn/twilight
• Wallflowers and supporting characters
• Vanishing and waning
• Deus ex machina
• Fade-in, fade-out
• Styles, trends and movements
• Generic inception/genesis
• Fads and crazes
• The icon – the ‘It’ girl, the ‘It’ film
• Popular re-emergence
• Disappearance
• Re-reading (or re-viewing)
• Remakes and reboots

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

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

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

Abstracts of no more than 350 words are invited by Friday 31 May 2013. Acceptances will be sent out by no later than Monday 17th June 2013. Please email abstracts and a cover sheet including your name, university, contact information, plus a brief biographical paragraph about your academic interests or any enquiries to marginalisedmainstream@gmail.com.

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

Conference email: marginalisedmainstream@gmail.com

Conference website: www.marginalisedmainstream.com

New Beginnings: Empowering Teen Girls, Deadline for Submissions is July 10th

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:54:32 -0400

MissHeard Magazine is a online magazine geared towards empowering teen girls. This is a start-up submission based publication, so there is a great need for writing from both adults and young women.

The theme of the first issue is “New Beginnings” for Fall 2013. We are looking for articles, personal stories, art, book/film reviews, poetry, and fiction, related to the theme. This could include anything from personal narratives about girlhood to how teen girls can start preparing for college. What’s your new hobby as a teenage girl? How did you handle new relationships/friendships when you were a teen? Do you have a new project you’re excited about? Did you write a new piece a fan fiction you are proud of? This is an opportunity to share your ideas, passions, and experiences in our first issue.

To be considered for the “New Beginnings” issue of MissHeard Magazine, please turn in all submissions no later than July 10th 2013. I will attempt to respond to all submissions.

Please note that submission does not guarantee that your piece will be chosen. Pieces by teens and for teens will be given preference. To submit, please send your article with a short bio to submissions@missheardmagazine.com.

Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium November 17-20 2013

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:28:06 -0400

Call for Papers
2013 American Literature Association's Jewish American & Holocaust Literature Symposium
Seeking papers on any aspect of Jewish American and Holocaust Literature for the 19th Annual JAHLIT Symposium at the landmark BETSY Hotel in South Beach,
Florida. The Conference will take place November 17-19, 2003. Send 250 word abstract, registration form, and $150 check for JAHLIT membership and conference fees to Holli Levitsky at hlevitsk@lmu.edu. Mailing address: Holli Levitsky, LMU Department of English, One LMU Drive, Suite 3800, Los Angeles, CA 90045-2659. The deadline for submitting an abstract is August 1, 2013. If you have any questions call Holli Levitsky at 310-338-7664 or Ezra Cappell at 915-747-5739. For more information, registration forms, and conference materials go to our website at: www.jahlit.com

Adoption: Crossing Boundaries, March 27-30 (due July 15); Florida State Univ.

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:28:39 -0400

Call for Proposals

ASAC's biennial conferences feature stories and histories of adoption as explored by writers, artists, and scholars across the disciplines, especially the humanities. Adoptions and the lives of adoptees always involve crossing boundaries, whether the boundaries of families, the boundaries of races, the boundaries of nations, the boundaries of aboriginal peoples and others, the boundaries of communities, the boundaries of law, or all of these borders. This conference takes up these themes and threads, and also encourages other kinds of boundary-crossing—boundaries between disciplines; between adoptees, birthparents, adoptive parents, and social workers; boundaries between creative writers, scholars, and activists. And we extend our topic across other boundaries by considering similar issues with regard to foster care and assisted reproduction.
The conference includes academic work from a wide range of scholarly disciplines and areas—literature, film and popular culture and performance studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, religion, political science, law, women’s and gender studies— as well as film, creative writing, graphic art, music, drama, or productions in other media. We encourage interdisciplinary panels, presentations, and productions.
Keynote speakers:

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing, Newcastle University (UK), Scottish-Nigerian adoptee, author of the groundbreaking volume of poetry The Adoption Papers, the adoption memoir Red Dust Road, and many other works of poetry, prose, and drama.

Laura Briggs, Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Duke UP, 2012), the winner of the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians

Featured films will include: Somewhere Between (2012), a documentary which follows four teenage girls adopted from China; Resilience (2009), which shows a Korean birthmother who searches for and meets her son in the US; and Any Day Now, (2012) a fictionalized account of a gay couple’s attempt to adopt a special-needs child they have fostered (the script is based in part on events in Florida, and we hope to have some of the parties at the conference.)

We invite proposals for papers and panels that:
● Analyze literary, cinematic, dramatic, musical, visual, dance, popular culture, or performance art representations of boundary crossing in adoption, foster care, or other nonstandard means of family formation or child care, and boundary crossing in narratives of the lives of adoptees, adoptive parents, and/or birthparents
● Study boundary-crossing in adoption and other reproductive, family and caring structures in historical, anthropological, philosophical, sociological, legal, religious, political, gendered, LGBTQ, and/or psychological perspectives.
● Promote dialogue between people positioned differently with regard to adoption because of their life experience, profession, and/or discipline.
We expect that most papers will run about 20 minutes and that panel proposals should allow some time for discussion (assuming that panels will be about an hour and fifteen minutes ).
We also invite creative presentations (writing, film, drama, graphic arts, other media, etc.) on border crossing in relation to adoption. Writing samples should ordinarily be less than 10 pages.
Please send 200-word proposals for papers or samples of creative work, a cv or resume along with your proposal, and links if you are working in visual or multimedia, to asac2014@fsu.edu. Give your proposal, cv, and/or writing sample a title that includes your last name.

Proposal deadline July 15, 2013

Applications from graduate students interested in submitting papers are invited for a travel grant award of up to $500. Awards will be given based on quality of paper submitted by July 15 (not just 200-word proposal), cost of travel, contribution of papers to scope of conference, and amount we have available.

A conference website is under development and we will soon post information about registration, accommodation, and travel. For additional information, contact Eric Walker at ewalker@fsu.edu

Conference program planning committee includes:

Eric Walker, Department of English, Florida State University, co-chair
Marianne Novy, University of Pittsburgh, co-chair
Karen Balcom, McMaster University
Emily Hipchen, University of West Georgia
Margaret Homans, Yale University

Common Ground, Conference Date October 25,2013, Proposals due October 5, 2013

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:13:39 -0400

http://www.michcea.com
Call for Papers: MCEA Conference, Friday, October 25, 2013
Theme: Common Ground

Luncheon Speakers: Artist David Small & Writer Sarah Stewart
Collaborators on Award-Winning Books for Children

Location: Henry Ford Community College
Mazzara Building, 5101 Evergreen Road, Dearborn MI 48128

Our country and our world are fraught with tension and conflict between different groups, including conflict between generations; administrations, faculty, and students; different ethnicities and cultural traditions; sexual orientations; genders; and socio-economic classes. How do we find a common ground to bridge our differences? We welcome papers about the topics below.

fiction, poetry, drama, creative non-fiction professional expectations/evaluation
classroom management teaching composition, literature, linguistics
preparing students for the work world English departments
research the lives of our students
curriculum development the creative process
computer or on-line instruction union/administration differences
race, class, and gender studies film studies

The Michigan College English Association invites proposals for individual papers and for complete or open panels for our Fall 2013 conference. We welcome proposals from experienced academics as well as from young scholars and graduate students. We encourage a variety of papers, including pedagogical and scholarly essays as well as poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction from creative writers. Graduate students with the best scholarly paper and the best creative writing will receive awards. To qualify for graduate student awards, the completed papers must be submitted to Janet Heller and David Settle by October 5, 2013.

Although we are calling for papers and panels that reflect the conference theme, we also welcome proposals in the variety of areas that English and Writing departments encompass: composition and rhetoric; computers and writing; critical pedagogy; critical studies in the teaching of English; cultural studies; developmental education; English as a second language; literary studies; multicultural literature; on-line English courses and the virtual university; popular culture; progressive education; reading and writing across the curriculum; student demographics; student/instructor accountability and assessment; student placement; study skills; and technical writing.
Proposals are due by October 5, 2013. Early submissions are welcome. Please submit proposals to Janet Heller and David Settle, Program Chairs, via email at janetheller@charter.net and dsettle@grcc.edu Please specify your needs for audio-visual equipment and the best time of day for your presentation.

Tenth Native American Symposium

Sat, 18 May 2013 15:01:27 -0400

Tenth Native American Symposium
Native Ground: Protecting and Preserving History, Culture, and Customs

Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Durant, Oklahoma
November 14-15, 2013

Keynote Speaker Dr. Brad Lieb

The Tenth Native American Symposium to be held November 14-15, 2013 at Southeastern Oklahoma State University will focus on the protection and preservation of Native American history, culture, and customs. Papers, presentations, panels, creative projects, and films addressing all aspects of Native American life and studies are welcome, including but not limited to archaeology, history, literature, law, medicine, education, religion, politics, social science, and the fine arts. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Brad Lieb from the Chickasaw Nation’s Division of History and Culture, and currently president of the Mississippi Association of Professional Archaeologists. All papers presented at the symposium will be eligible for inclusion in a peer-reviewed volume of published proceedings, which will also be posted on our new website at http://homepages.se.edu/nas/.

Send abstracts of no more than 250 words by July 15, 2013 in either electronic (preferred) or hard-copy form to Dr. Mark B. Spencer, Department of English, Humanities, and Languages, Box 4121, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, 1405 N 4th Ave, Durant, OK 74701-0609, mspencer@se.edu.

Literature and Medicine in the Eighteenth Century: NEMLA 2014, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; April 3-6

Sat, 18 May 2013 06:13:57 -0400

Literature and Medicine in the Eighteenth Century
The eighteenth century has been described as an era of increasing medicalization. Bodies became the subject of extensive political intervention, from mass inoculations to centralized responses to epidemics. For Michel Foucault, medicalization promoted disciplinary control and surveillance into the fabric of the body. With the expansion of print, lay people took responsibility for managing their health through their own knowledge of physiology and medicine. Self-regimen or preventative medicine, based on Hippocratic and Galenic principles, was contingent on the patient’s knowledge of their own lifestyle and constitution. E.C. Spary writes, “the body is central to the transformations of eighteenth-century medical historiography. Once the unproblematic subject of medical interventions, it has become the site of lived experience, a palimpsest on which medical, political, and personal authority are inscribed, and a key locus for the fashioning of identity, subjectivity, and selfhood.” Therefore, the imbrication of medical language and literary composition provide a useful frame for understanding the articulation of the body as a sign. This panel explores the complex intersections between literature and eighteenth century medical discourse, and considers their relation to our understanding of gender studies, gender politics, science, medicine, and literature.

This panel seeks papers that explore the complex intersections between eighteenth-century literature and medical discourse. How does the imbrication of medical language and literary composition provide a frame for understanding the articulation of the body as a sign? How has medical discourse influenced the fashioning of identity, subjectivity, and selfhood? Please submit 300-400 word abstracts and brief biographical statements to Kathleen Alves at kalves@qcc.cuny.edu by September 30.

Re-Imagining Communities and Civil Society Conference [UPDATE: Deadline Extended]

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:23:52 -0400

The aim of this conference is to explore what role social movements, artists, intellectuals, writers, cultural institutions and others play in shaping our ideas of community, civil society and the connections between the two. We are especially interested in papers and panels that examine how the creation and strengthening of ties between communities and civil society promote democratization in Europe and/or Latin America. However, we welcome abstracts on any aspect of community and civil society.

Civil society is the nongovernmental space of associational life. As Philip Oxhorn, author of "Organizing Civil Society," explains, civil society is composed of groups that “simultaneously resist subordination to the state and demand inclusion in national political structures” (252). These groups can be grassroots political associations, church groups, bowling leagues, book clubs, etc. While academics in the humanities are familiar with the concept of “community,” the term “civil society” has largely remained in the realm of the social sciences. This conference seeks to expand the boundaries of the terms and to explore relationships of communities and civil society by considering the following topics:

• What role do civil-society organizations play in the formation of (artistic, ethnic, sexual, local, etc.) communities?
• Who sponsors civil societies? How are communities and civil-society organizations funded and maintained?
• How have philosophers, artists and producers of culture defined the concepts of community, civil society, and the interplay between the two? What is/has been the role of culture in shaping and bringing together communities and civil society?
• How do cultural institutions (academies, literary and artistic prizes, cultural festivals) contribute to civil society? As civil society organizations, what role do cultural institutions play in the creation of new communities or preserving communities? How is a community shaped by its inclusion or exclusion from canonical/ mainstream/ recognized cultural events sponsored by cultural institutions? What are the relationships between cultural institutions and the communities they are intended to serve? How do communities and civil society define cultural value?
• What has been, and what is likely to be, the role of both mainstream and alternative news media in shaping our understanding of civil society? Do social media strengthen civil societies and empower organized societal actors to assert claims vis-à-vis the state and corporations? How does this vary within and between societies in the Americas and Europe?
• What effect has the discourse of civil society had on language policy, linguistic rights, language revitalization, and identity? What are the roles of marginalized speech communities in the construction of a civil society?
• Are think-tanks part of civil society in Europe and the Americas? What role do they play, and what role should they play, in efforts to make the term “civil society” known to a broader cross-section of society, for example through University courses and programs? What role do think tanks play in organizing and shaping the claims-making by collective actors toward the state and corporations?
• How do artists, writers, and other cultural producers shape community or a civil society into arenas in which non-citizens can participate?
• Can civil society usher in new forms of art and/or enable artists to reclaim public spaces for social action? Can forging a connection between civil society and communities also bridge the space between politics and aesthetics?
• How can we create forms of collective action that are attentive to class and racial differences by forging connections between local communities and civil society?
• How do NGOs help enrich civil society? How can NGOs mediate the relationship between community and government?
• Has the discourse of culture been displaced by the discourse of civil society (David Chandler 2010), particularly in multiethnic communities in Latin America?

October 25-27, 2013

Languages of the conference: English, French and Spanish.

Papers will be considered for publication

Guelph is 80 km from Toronto and 50 km from the Toronto airport. Greyhound departs almost every other hour from Toronto to the University of Guelph campus.

Keynote Speakers: James F. English, John Welsh Centennial Professor of English and Director of the Penn Humanities Forum, Judith Adler Hellman, Professor, Coordinator of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, York University, Philip Oxhorn, Professor, Founding Director of the Institute for the Study of International Development, McGill University.

A 500 word abstract of individual papers or sessions should be sent by June 30, 2013 to the conference committee at gyovanov@uoguelph.ca

[UPDATE] Keynote Speaker Jasbir Puar - 'Containers' Graduate Student Conference, NYC, October 18th & 19th,

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:10:01 -0400

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

Stony Brook Manhattan
October 18th & 19th, 2013

Keynote Lecture to be delivered by:
Jasbir Puar (Rutgers University)

“Containers”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

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

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

C21 Literature Journal: Twenty First Century Genre

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:04:26 -0400

CALL FOR PAPERS
C21 LITERATURE: ISSUE THREE AUTUMN 2014: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GENRE

Genre has become an increasingly significant part of academic and popular criticism since the year 2000. From Steampunk to Crunch Lit, Young Adult to Nordic Noir, new genres have arisen to sustain fiction and popular culture markets in the new millennium. Issue three of C21 Literature asks if the politics of genre can offer insights into developments across the first thirteen years of the twenty-first century. If genre development is a process of evolution then how and where do these genres originate – and what are the intertextual and historical frames in which they operate? The journal calls for articles examining developments in genre across the twenty-first century. Topics may include:

• the history of literary genre
• multi-platformed genre developments
• new genres and authors
• cultural studies and genre
• politics and genre
• humour and genre
• academia and genre
• technology and genre
• popular culture and parody
• alternative histories
• old genres, new millennium
•
C21 Literature also seeks reviews, features and opinion pieces from academics, readers and writers and conference reports relating to twenty-first century genres.
Articles should be 6000–7000 words.
Reviews and conference reports should be 1000–2000 words. The journal uses the author/date Chicago style referencing system.
Full article submission, abstracts only will not be considered.
Please send all submissions, questions or enquiries to journal editor Dr Katy Shaw at K.Shaw@brighton.ac.uk

About The Journal
C21 Literature is an international peer reviewed journal that aims to create a critical, discursive space for the promotion and exploration of 21-st century writings in English. It addresses a range of narratives in contemporary culture, from the novel, poem and play to hypertext, digital gaming and contemporary creative writing. The journal features engaged theoretical pieces alongside new unpublished creative works and investigates the challenges that new media present to traditional categorizations of literary writing.
Website: http://www.gylphi.co.uk/journals/C21Literature/
Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/C21Literature
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/c21literature
Blog: http://c21literature.blogspot.co.uk/

Special essay cluster on ‘Space and Place in Italo/Glaswegian Life Narratives’ for a/b: Auto/Biography Studies - deadline 20 Dec

Fri, 17 May 2013 07:49:52 -0400

Call for Papers
Special essay cluster on ‘Space and Place in Italo/Glaswegian Life Narratives’ for a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
Guest editors: Sarah Edwards and Katharine Mitchell, School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Glasgow is a world city – the second city of Scotland, the ninth biggest financial centre of Europe, and a major international tourist destination following decades of regeneration, which culminated in its selection as host of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. It is also a multi-cultural city, whose economic and cultural development has been shaped by many immigrant communities, notably the Italo-Scots. Most Italian immigration to the UK took place at the end of the nineteenth century, and the city of Glasgow became the home of the third largest community in the country. While much has been written about Italian migration to America and other Anglophone countries, and there is an increasing body of scholarship on Italo-Scots culture and identity, there is very little work on the developing nature of Glaswegian-Italian identities or their wider impact both on other ethnic and urban cultures, and on forms of life writing.
This special essay cluster seeks submissions which focus specifically on issues of space and place in auto/biographical depictions of the city. There is an increasing amount of work on, for example, urban memory and nostalgia, memorials, the relationships between literary texts and the built environment, urban regeneration and city branding in the fields of life writing, literary and film studies, diaspora and migration studies, cultural and architectural history, cultural geography and urban studies. This includes a growing body of scholarship on Scottish identities and landscapes in an increasingly devolved and independent state. We invite essays, then, which draw on aspects of this work to consider how Italo-Glaswegian auto/biographical texts both shape, and are shaped by, the literary, cultural, economic and architectural places and spaces of Glasgow.
We are interested in a range of narratives, including autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, television productions, films and internet resources such as blogs, twitterfeeds and oral histories, which explore the concepts of space and place in diverse ways. These might include:
- the development of Glaswegian identities over successive generations (eg, themes of alienation; a sense of ‘not belonging’ to either country; shifting allegiances during the world wars; changing relationships to concepts of wider Scottish, British and European identities – for example, to the Italian town of Barga, which hosts an annual Scottish fish and chip festival; and relationships to Italian-American identities (as depicted, for example, in Sergio Casci’s 2003 film American Cousins)
- the shaping of religious identities in a Scottish city divided (both literally, culturally and discursively) by Catholic and Presbyterian sectarianism
- the role of Italian culture in the urban regeneration of Glasgow during the 1980s and 1990s (for example, accounts of the inception, development and subsequent uses of the Italian Centre in Merchant City)
- Glaswegian-Italian café culture (in the autobiographies of Joe Pesci; in relation to questions of class and popular stereotypes of Glaswegian-Italian identity as family business owners; as a separatist community; as creators of a new culinary culture)
- women’s roles in café culture (their familial and business roles; the ‘feminised’ space of the café as a courting zone and as a space for wider community cohesion)
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (http://abstudies.web.unc.edu/) welcomes submissions of scholarly essays related to all aspects of autobiography and biography studies. We are especially interested in scholarship that crosses disciplinary and genre boundaries, explores new sites and methods of identity construction, and in receiving submissions from the international community of scholars of life narrative. All submitted essays should have a relevant theoretical framework and participate in contemporary conversations within the field of auto/biography studies.
Potential contributors may find it helpful to refer to back issues of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies prior to submitting their work for consideration. Individual articles and full issues are now available on Project MUSE.
Submission guidelines
Essays should be emailed to sarah.m.edwards@strath.ac.uk and katharine.mitchell@strath.ac.uk by 20 December 2013. We welcome any enquiries from potential authors.
Essays should be between 7,500 and 10,000 words in length, including notes and the Works Cited pages.
All essays must follow the format of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.). The a/b Style Sheet can be found at this address: http://abstudies.web.unc.edu/submissions/
Authors must also include a fifty-word abstract and two to four keywords with their submissions.
In order to ensure a blind peer review, remove any identifying information, including citations that refer to you as the author in the first person. Cite previous publications, etc. with your last name to preserve the blind reading process.
Include your name, address, email, the title of your essay, and your affiliation in a cover letter or cover sheet for your essay. Cover letters may be addressed to the editors, Sarah Edwards and Katharine Mitchell.
Please note that while a/b does make every effort to undertake the peer review process in a timely manner, the process can take between six and eight months.
It is the author’s responsibility to secure any necessary copyright permissions and essays may not progress into the publication stage without written proof of right to reprint.

[REMINDER] Allegory Studies? (abstracts deadline 31 May)

Fri, 17 May 2013 05:48:16 -0400

CALL FOR PAPERS

ALLEGORY STUDIES?
University of Warwick
7 November 2013

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Jon Whitman (English, The Hebrew University)

OTHER CONFIRMED SPEAKERS AND CHAIRS: Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. (Psychology, UCSC), Lisa Rosenthal (Art and Design, UIUC), Christiania Whitehead (English and CLS, Warwick)

CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/emforum/events/allegory

The one-day interdisciplinary conference seeks to bring together scholars of different disciplinary backgrounds who share an interest in the history and theory of allegory in order to explore and promote the notion of allegory studies as an emergent nexus of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Since the mid-twentieth century, allegory has increasingly been approached as a subject in its own right, informed by, but transcending particular disciplinary, periodical, or author-focused contexts. This development seems to have reached a critical point over the past two decades, which have seen a steady stream of articles and monographs, as well as such comprehensive reference works as an Encyclopedia of Allegorical Literature (Leeming and Drowne 1996), a Dictionary of Allegorical Meanings (Brumble 1999), a pioneering collaborative overview of allegorical interpretation in the West (Whitman 2000), and, most recently, volumes in the New Critical Idiom (Tambling 2010) and Cambridge Companions (Copeland and Struck 2010) series. A number of recent conferences and seminar panels have approached the subject without disciplinary or periodical restrictions, and the phrase “allegory studies” – although traceable at least to Gordon Teskey’s Allegory and Violence (1996) – has begun to appear in contemporary scholarship on the subject.

By all accounts, then, the current state or research on allegory seems to be marked by the consolidation of a long and extraordinarily productive tradition of scholarship – including contributions from such fields as art history, classics, intellectual history, linguistics and cognitive science, literary studies and literary theory, philosophy, theology, religion studies – into a coherent interdisciplinary formation in its own right. At this propitious moment, papers are invited from scholars of any disciplinary background to discuss the various issues raised by these developments, such as (but not limited to):

- Why allegory studies? What is it about this subject that seems to demand a dedicated interdisciplinary platform in its own right?

- What are the main achievements of allegory studies thus far? What are the most promising avenues of exploration?

- Theory and history in allegory studies – what light does theoretical work throw on the history of allegory, and conversely, how do historically contextualized perspectives bear on the theoretical approaches to the subject?

- What is the relation between the marked rise in allegory scholarship since c. 1950 and the roughly coextensive “revival of allegory” originating in the work of such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man and permeating various corners of the contemporary academic and cultural sphere?

Papers are solicited from scholars of any disciplinary background and career stage – proposals from graduates and junior academics are especially welcome. Applicants are encouraged to engage with the subject of allegory and allegory studies in ways which transcend traditional disciplinary and periodisational boundaries, and priority will be given to abstracts clearly demonstrating the ability to communicate effectively to the interdisciplinary audience the conference aims to attract. It is hoped that the conference will lead to a publication showcasing the wide array of current approaches to the subject and paving the way for further collaboration and research.

500-word abstracts for 20-minute papers, accompanied by a brief biographical note, to be sent to the convenor, Vladimir Brljak (English and CLS, Warwick), at v.brljak@warwick.ac.uk by 31 May 2013.

Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (www.coldnoon.com) Call for Entries (Research Papers/ Poetry), deadline 6th June 2013

Fri, 17 May 2013 04:22:21 -0400

Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is an International Print and Online Literary Journal published as a quarterly (online, ISSN 2278-9650) and bi-yearly (print, ISSN 2278-9642).

CALL FOR ENTRIES:

Coldnoon: Travel Poetics invites writers and researchers to submit their original works of poetry, creative non-fiction, art/book/film reviews or research papers on travel/travel poetics for publication in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, Jun ‘13, Issue VII (online). The works published in the forthcoming issue will be republished in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, Autumn 2013, along with the subsequent online issue of Sep ‘13, Issue VIII, in October, 2013.

The last date of sending submissions is 6th June, 2013.
To read about the concept of Coldnoon, travelogy and travel poetics please visit our website www.coldnoon.com.

The submission categories and criteria are:

POETRY – Submit at least 4 poems, and not more than 6, in MS Word Doc. format only. Please ensure your poems are properly formatted, and the lineation is as desired. Before you submit, we suggest you read our previous publications of poetry, once, so as to have a clear idea of the kinds of poetry we like, or tend to understand better.

NON FICTION, RESEARCH PAPERS & REVIEWS – Works may be based on travel in literature, cinema, culture, and more. Submit a full length essay not less than 2500 words, or review not less than 1500 words. Format your paper on standard A4 (8.3*11.7 sq. inch) paper, with 1 inch margin on each side. Citations, if any, should be in MLA format. Use endnotes instead of footnotes. Also check your paper for proper indentation before submitting. The works will be checked stringently for plagiarism; avoid any whatsoever. Attach your submission in MS Word doc. format only.

We accept only email submissions. In your email mark subject as “Submission”. Along with the submission attach your biographical details of not more than 100 words. Also state in the body of your email that you are the sole author/s of the work submitted and that no other person or institution may assert moral right over the work, but you.

Email your submissions to: submissions@coldnoon.com

Special Issue: Literature and American Exceptionalism (September 1, 2013)

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:50:40 -0400

In what ways does literature reinforce, contest, and amend the discourse of American exceptionalism? Exceptionalism in its simplest form refers to a range of nationalist beliefs that together locate the United States as exemplary in relation to other nation-states. Although not coined until 1929 and not popularized until the postwar period, exceptionalism appears in different forms throughout American history, from John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” to Harry Truman’s “leader of the free world” to, most recently, George W. Bush’s “nation with a mission.” The latter’s declaration of the ongoing Global War on Terror in September 2001 has provoked further debate among scholars on the enduring legacy of exceptionalist claims.

Yet, despite interest among political scientists and cultural critics, American exceptionalism remains an under-theorized subject within literary studies. This special issue of LIT thus considers the place of literature in the past and present debates surrounding US exceptionalist thinking. If, as Donald Pease argues, exceptionalism maintains “structures of disavowal,” through what strategies might authors complicate these structures? When, on the other hand, does literature endorse exceptionalist nationalism? In what ways does exceptionalism inform literary production and criticism?

The editors encourage the submission of essays that theorize American exceptionalism in combination with clear and engaging textual analysis. Submissions should be between 5,000 and 10,000 words in length and formatted according to MLA Style. Please send manuscripts and 200-word abstracts to Guest Editor Joseph Darda at litjourn@yahoo.com.

Submission deadline: September 1, 2013

LIT also encourages submissions for general issues.

Smart, Sincere, and Quirky Auteurs – SAMLA (Atlanta, 11/8 to 11/10)

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:26:11 -0400

I seek papers for a panel on auteurship in recent Hollywood cinema, especially films that have alternately been called the “New Sincerity” (Collins), “smart” (Sconce), “Mumblecore” (Masunaga), “post-pop” (Mayshark), and “quirky” (MacDowell).

Papers may discuss Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Judd Apatow, Noah Baumbach, Sofia Coppola, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Miranda July, Charlie Kaufman, Richard Linklater, Alexander Payne, David O. Russell, among others. Discussions of Mumblecore and its major figures— Andrew Bujalski, Lena Dunham, Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass, Lynn Shelton, Joe Swanberg—are also welcome. I especially encourage papers that consider the ongoing (in)validity of auteur theory in the digital age, how these directors either employ or avoid irony, how they appeal to commercial audiences, and how they demonstrate the influence or revision of earlier auteurs from classic Hollywood, European art cinema, or New Hollywood.

Please submit a proposal of 250 words and a working bibliography to Pete Kunze at pkunze@lsu.edu by June 10.

Accepted presenters must join SAMLA (membership information available here: http://samla.memberclicks.net/membership-information) and register for the conference (before October 1, $70 for students, adjuncts, and retired members; $125 for all others).

The Films of Robert Rodriguez

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

Call For Papers: The Films of Robert Rodriguez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2013 SAMLA CONFERENCE, NOV 8-10, ATLANTA

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

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

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

Some possible topics include:

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

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

Apollon eJournal - Undergraduate Submissions deadline 6/15/2013

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

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

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

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

[UPDATE] Irish Gothic Conference 5-6 December, 2013

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:35:56 -0400

Confirmed Speakers:

• Professor W. J. McCormack (Former Professor of Literary History at Goldsmiths College, University of London)
• Dr Laura Pelaschiar (Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Università di Trieste)
• Dr Derek Hand (Senior Lecturer in English, Saint' Patrick's College, Dublin City University)

Gothic studies have recently been expanding previous limits of what was once thought to be an historically well defined genre. The extent of continual change in Gothic denotation is such that it is now approaching the status of an inter-genre inter-semiotic category. This is even more the case with Irish literature. Not only because a remarkable number of Gothic writers are Irish, but also, and more significantly, because Ireland has provided an extremely fruitful cultural background for the particular narrative forms and devices that are usually associated with the Gothic. Moreover, Irish literature presents a “gothicness” of its own, whereby it seems to simultaneously adhere to and reject the ideological and aesthetic models implied by the very notion of Gothic.

At this conference we will explore the ways in which Irish Gothic can/cannot be considered part of the mainstream Gothic tradition, as well as investigating the origins and evolution of the genre in an Irish context.

We welcome submissions addressing any topic relevant to Irish studies, and encourage papers, which explore any aspect of the Irish Gothic in literature, film, and other media.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Irish Gothic vs English Gothic
• The Birth of Irish Gothic
• Theorising Irish Gothic
• Irish Gothic Modernisms
• The Uncanny in Irish Fiction
• Victorian Irish Gothic
• Irish Gothic Geography
• Irish Gothic in the Media
• Irish Gothic Art
• Irish Gothic and Psychology
• Irish Gothic and Imperialism
• Irish Gothic and Science
• Irish Gothic and Technology
• Irish Gothic and Popular “Goth” Culture
• Irish Gothic and History

Abstracts (250 words max) for 20 minute papers and a short bio-sketch may be submitted to Enrico Terrinoni (Università per Stranieri di Perugia) and Annalisa Volpone (Università degli Studi di Perugia): perugiairishgothic@gmail.com.
Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2013.
Accepted speakers will be notified by September 20.
Conference fee: Euro 25; Euro 15 for students and the unwaged

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Re)thinking Global Connectedness: Critical Perspectives on Globalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memsahibs as Imagined and Imaged by Male Writers (Deadline: September 30, 2013)

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:09:22 -0400

Session Title: MEMSAHIBS AS IMAGINED AND IMAGED BY MALE WRITERS

45th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 3-6, 2014
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Host: Susquehanna University

Session Description:
The memsahib is perhaps the most maligned figure among the Raj women. This panel invites scholarly articles on how male writers represent the memsahib in their writings, and how they depict her impact on and/or relationship with British India.

Topics for papers may include, but are not limited to:
• Critical analysis of literature on memsahibs
• Letters, memoirs, fiction and non-fiction about memsahibs (not by memsahibs)
• Memsahib’s relationship with and contribution to British India
• The Raj machinery and the role of the memsahib
• Home-building and Empire-building
• Memsahib’s role in the success and/or failure of colonization
• Memsahib and the trauma of the Indian Mutiny
• Memsahib and racism
• Memsahib and the ‘myth of the destructive female’
• Colonized and colonizer women
• Memsahibs as ‘maternal imperialists’
• Unconventional memsahibs; what makes them unconventional?
• Study of gender and imperialism
• Intra-racial tensions, if any, in the gaze of memsahibs
• Life at Home and out in the Colony
• Sense of exile and pain of alienation
• Femininity and/or feminism in memsahib’s female gaze

Please feel free to share your ideas for papers even if they are about literary depiction of white women in other British colonies.

Email: Dr Susmita Roye (sroye@desu.edu) with a 300-word abstract.

Deadline: September 30, 2013

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

The 2014 event will include guest speakers, literary readings, professional events, and workshops. A reading by George Saunders will open the Convention. His 2013 collection of short fiction, The Tenth of December, has been acclaimed by the New York Times as “the best book you’ll read this year.” The Keynote speaker will be David Staller of Project Shaw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology and Innovation is published by Cognizant Communication Corporation.

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

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

International Journal for Welsh Writing in English

Call for Papers

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

Guest Editors: Kirsti Bohata & Matthew Jarvis.

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

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

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

International Journal of Welsh Writing in English

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

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