cfp.english.upenn.edu

Call for Papers: American Studies Area
Southwest/Texas Popular Culture & American Culture Associations 31st Annual Conference
February 10-13, 2010
Hyatt Regency, Albuquerque, NM
Submission Deadline: 12/15/09, Priority Registration Deadline 11/1/09
Conference Hotel:
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
330 Tijeras
Albuquerque, NM 87102
505.842.1234

Further conference details are available at http://www.swtxpca.org

Panels are now being formed in the American Studies area. Scholars, researchers, professionals, teachers, graduate students and others interested in this area are encouraged to submit an abstract. Graduate students are especially encouraged and will be assisted in accessing any and all award opportunities the conference and/or associations provide.

American Studies is a broad area and one that MUST be interdisciplinary. While the area is one that should be centered in the cultures of the Americas, especially the United States, a particularly vibrant area of inquiry is increasingly found in the transnational, intra-national and global considerations of these cultures. Topics offering multiple perspectives in this vein on the American Southwest are especially welcome. Listed below are several possible topics, however, these should not be considered either prescriptive or limiting in regards to your creativity in this area.

•The Invisibility of the American Worker in National, Transnational and Colonial Contexts
•American Mobility and Power: Intersections between Culture, Identity and Travel
•The International Metaphor of the Western Frontier
•Transnational Hollywood: Fact and Fiction
•Post-Borderlands
•Intersecting the Biopolitical, the Transnational and the Indigenous
•The Trouble with Citizenship: Community, Resistance, Migration
•“States of Exception” in the U. S. Empire
•World Perspectives on the Obama Presidency
•Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity and Culture in Obama’s America

Email 250-word abstracts for individual presentations or 500-word abstracts for panel proposals to Area Chair Lisa K. Stein (English Department, Ohio University Zanesville) at stein@ohio.edu. Please include a current CV and contact information for each participant. And, if you mention the conference or the American Studies area in your subject line, it will insure the speedy attention to and handling of your submission.

Upon acceptance, all presenters must register by December 31, 2009. Registration is available online at the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association website: http://swtxpca.org. Early registration discounts are available, as is hotel and transportation information.

Lisa K. Stein
Area Chair: American Studies
stein@ohio.edu
Ohio University Zanesville
Visit the website: http://swtxpca.org

NEW PLENARY SPEAKER: DARKO SUVIN

Modernism and Utopia: Convergences in the Arts

Confirmed plenary speakers:

Doug Mao, Johns Hopkins University
Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading
Darko Suvin, McGill University

Proposals are invited for 20-minute conference presentations that consider modernism in relation to utopia and utopianism, in written, visual, aural, and plastic media.

The aim of the conference is to encourage debate between and across disciplines with a focus on the varied historical, cultural, technological, and intellectual settings in which the modernism/utopia nexus might be clarified and explained.

A principal goal of the conference is not just to engage with but to challenge, build on, and extend current work in the new utopian and new modernist studies. Suggested points of departure for these last two critical domains might include, but are by no means limited to, all current and forthcoming volumes of the Ralahine Utopian Studies book series and the latest articles in periodicals such as 'Modernism/Modernity' and 'Utopian Studies'.

The conference organizers will be working towards a publishing outcome for this project: an essay volume based on essays worked up from the best conference papers, as well as specially commissioned articles (for which the organizers have already had talks with a major academic publisher).

Suggestions for topics might include, but are not restricted to, the following:

- modernism and authors/painters of utopias
- sound/music, utopianism, and modernism
- modernist architecture/sculpture and utopia
- utopia, modernism, and modernity
- modernism, science fiction, and utopia
- specific traditions of utopian thought in relation to modernism
- modernism and philosophers of the utopian
- utopianists as modernists/modernists as utopianists
- modernism and utopianism as ‘isms’
- ethics in relation to modernism and utopia

The conference will be held in Birmingham, England, April 23rd – 24th 2010, and is being organized by James Barnett, Alice Reeve-Tucker, and Nathan Waddell. Postgraduates are highly encouraged to attend and/or give a paper. The conference website can be found here: www.mod-utopia.bham.ac.uk

For further information or to offer a conference paper please contact Nathan Waddell by email (preferred) or post.

Email:

modernism-utopia@hotmail.co.uk

Post:

Department of English, College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT

PLEASE SEND PROPOSALS OF 250 WORDS BY DECEMBER 1st 2009

Official Call For Papers – “Bruce Kirle Memorial Emerging Scholarship Panel”

The Music Theatre/Dance (MT/D) Focus Group of The Association for Theatre in Higher
Education (ATHE) announces its call for papers for the “Bruce Kirle Memorial Emerging
Scholarship Panel in Music Theatre/Dance” for the 2010 ATHE conference in Los Angeles, CA (August 3–6, 2010). This annual panel is held in memory of Dr. Bruce Kirle, a longtime member of the Music Theatre/Dance focus group. Dr. Judith Sebesta will serve as the respondent. Dr. Sebesta, Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Lamar University, is co-editor of Women in American Musical Theatre (McFarland, 2008), and currently serves as chair of the ATHE Nominations Committee and performance review editor of Theatre Journal.

Papers may address any area in the purview of the Music Theatre/Dance Focus group, which includes opera, operettas, musicals, dance theatre, performance art with music or dance elements, and pedagogy in music theatre and dance. Submissions are open to graduate students and scholars who have not presented at a national conference, as well as established scholars who have not presented or published in the areas of music theatre or dance.

To be considered for this panel, please email your 10-12 page paper and contact information as an MS Word attachment by January 30, 2010 to Jason Fitzgerald via email at jason.fitzgerald@yale.edu. Please remove your name from anywhere in the body of the essay, and include a cover page with your name, paper title, affiliation and contact information.

Submissions will be vetted by a committee comprised of select MT/D officers as well as senior faculty in the field. Three of the essays will be chosen for inclusion on this competitive panel. The selected authors are expected to attend the conference in August to present their papers. They will receive a year-long subscription to the journal Studies in Musical Theatre (Intellect), and their essays will be published in the journal. Papers selected will need to be shortened for their presentation at the conference, but will be published in their full-length form. Selected authors will also receive a complimentary copy of Bruce Kirle’s Unfinished Show Business, generously donated by his family. If you have any questions, please email Ronald Zank at rjzc46@mail.missouri.edu. For more information on the ATHE conference visit http://www.athe.org.

The Society for the Study of Rebecca Harding Davis and Her World will host two sessions at the annual conference of the American Literature Association. The conference will be held May 27-30, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency (Embarcadero Center) in San Francisco, California. For further information about the conference, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org.

Session One: Approaches to Teaching Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills.” We envision this session as a roundtable discussion among participants who teach at all levels and who offer a variety of approaches to this complex text. To encourage discussion, presentations will be limited to 8-10 minutes.

Session Two: “Open” Topic. We are interested in proposals that touch on any topic in Davis’s work and especially welcome proposals that draw attention to her lesser-known texts. Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes.

Deadline: December 15, 2009

Please send a one-page abstract and a brief C.V. to Mischa Renfroe.

Email: mrenfroe@mtsu.edu

Postal Mail:
Mischa Renfroe
Middle Tennessee State University
Department of English
P.O. Box 70
Murfreesboro, TN 37132

First Women and the Politics of Looking: Gender, Indigeneity and Representation

Ed. Wendy Gay Pearson, Kimberly J. Verwaayen, Ernie Blackmore and Renée E. Bédard

Description:

This anthology will focus on the representation and especially the self-representation of Indigenous girls and women in the arts. The editors are particularly interested in articles that address questions of cultural imagination, resistance, recuperation and the complex politics of representation within the fraught spaces of cultural and geopolitical contexts that may be considered variously colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial.

Some of the questions that contributors might address include: How are Indigenous girls and women both traditionally and non-traditionally signified in either Indigenous or non-Indigenous cultural production? How do such significations vary in mainstream cultural products compared with avant-garde or experimental work? How do artistic and theoretical contributions by Indigenous girls and women intervene – if they do – in cultural understanding of gendered indigenous lives? Are the “appropriation of voice” debates still meaningful in an era of heightened production by Aboriginal women artists, film-makers, writers and theorists? How does collaboration between non-Indigenous and Aboriginal individuals or communities work in relation to the representation of girls and women broadly, and what are its cultural and political implications? How do the histories and genealogies of Indigenous representation affect contemporary cultural work? What are the implications of generic choices, including autobiography, ficto-criticism, fiction and varieties of non-fiction? How do Aboriginal women speak differences of class, sexuality, age, location and other forms of identification in ways that can be heard and understood across a collective cultural imagination?

What we’re looking for:

The editors of this anthology invite papers that respond to any of these issues through a critical concern with the (de)construction of historically raced, classed, and sexed subjectivities of Aboriginal women, especially in relation to issues of identity and the representation of Aboriginal girls and women in works of art, film, music, literature, or other forms of cultural production. We also invite articles that explore particular intersections of ‘postcolonial’ theory and feminism in relation to gendered indigeneity and its varieties of representation, or which assess how canonical and other understandings of cultural, theoretical, and aesthetic “value” are embedded in histories of colonization (and resistance) to limit (or encourage) self-representation by Aboriginal girls and women.

Deadlines:

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be received by the editors on or before January 1, 2010. Email submissions are preferred, in WordPerfect, MS Word or RTF format.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by February 26, 2010, and the finished articles will be due by June 30, 2010.

To submit abstracts or for more information, please contact one of the editors:

Dr. Wendy Gay Pearson, Film Studies, University of Western Ontario (wpearson@uwo.ca) or Dr. Kimberly J. Verwaayen, Women’s Studies and Feminist Research, University of Western Ontario (kjverwaa@uwo.ca) or Dr. Ernie Blackmore, Woolyungah Indigenous Centre, University of Wollongong (ernie@uow.edu.au) or Dr. Renée Bédard, Native Studies, University of Western Ontario (renee.bedard@gmail.com)

POSTGRADUATE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

THE EUROPEANNESS OF EUROPEAN CINEMA

Keynote Speaker: Thomas Elsaesser

Confirmed Plenary Speakers: Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau

Studies in European cinema have often been focused on specific countries, genres or auteurs. However, there has been, since the 1990s, a renewed interest in European film as an entity with a significance beyond the sum of its parts. Promoted by the policies in support of the audiovisual industry set in motion by the Council of Europe and the European Union, this new interest led to an amplified debate on Europe and the cinema that is produced and consumed there.

Meanwhile, top of the theoretical agenda, the issue of identity has surfaced as the prime concern. As the framework shifts from national to transnational cinemas and concepts such as ‘hyphenated identity’ and ‘double occupancy’ gather strength, this conference seeks to explore the ongoing validity of Europe as a reference in film. Papers are welcomed on any aspect of how European identity might define itself through cinema, spanning issues of representation, industry and cultural policy. Areas of interest might include:

- pan-European production and distribution strategies;
- the label ‘Europe’ in film distribution and exhibition, including festival circuits;
- examples of films that engage with the idea of Europe;
- how particular national cinemas might simultaneously identify themselves as European;
- the issue of language, dubbing and subtitling;
- and how any of these questions might have shifted historically and with the advent of new European initiatives.

Please submit an abstract (max. 300 words), contact information and short bio (max. 100 words) to: europeanness@kcl.ac.uk

New Directions in Critical Theory
April 30-May 1, 2010
The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ

New Directions in Critical Theory: Borders, Power, Community

“Borderlands, contrary to frontiers, are no longer the lines where civilization and barbarism meet and divide, but the location where a new consciousness . . . emerges.”
—2010 New Directions Keynote Walter Mignolo
(From "Globalization, Civilization, and Languages")

The 2010 New Directions in Critical Theory conference, an annual interdisciplinary conference organized by graduate students at the University of Arizona, seeks papers, panels, and presentations that focus on issues regarding borders, power, and community. These concepts have seen increased exposure in academic and public spheres due to the rapid rate of globalization, and the pressure globalization puts on communities, such as the pressure to define and protect their integrity at intersections of the local, national, and international.

While the connections among borders, power, and community can be useful in theory, they can be problematic in practice, leading to such diverse questions as: In what ways do shared communities create, and perhaps constrain, one’s identity (gendered, sexual, racial, ethnic, etc.)? How does one define borders within one’s profession or discipline, and how does this definition inform one’s practice? How might the border between written and visual production influence one’s work? How do the implicit/explicit borders shared by the local, the global, and the institutional influence research methods? How have you used your poetry/creative writing to complicate, define, and/or deconstruct a border concept? How has your community organization responded to implicit/explicit cultural and/or institutional borders?

We invite papers and panels that attempt to address these questions and questions like them; we also invite presentations such as round-table discussions, short play readings, poetry readings, performance art or installations, community projects, etc., that open dialogue among various disciplines.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Borderlands and literature
• Borders in ethnographic study
• Border thinking
• Borderlands in postcolonial literature and theory
• Decolonizing practices and epistemologies within and external to the university
• Geopolitics of knowledge production
• Cultural studies
• Border pedagogies
• Border rhetorics
• Gender studies
• Mestizo/a identities
• Spatial rhetoric
• Borders in an historical/psychological context
• Borders within and among communities
• Borders and community in journalism

Please submit 100-250 word individual abstracts, or panel proposals consisting of a 100-250 word panel abstract and 100-250 word individual abstracts for each presentation. Include names, email addresses, mailing addresses, institutional affiliations, technology requests, paper titles, and abstracts by December 15th, 2009 to New Directions Co-Chairs at ndconf@gmail.com.

We are pleased to announce the following Keynote Speaker:

Walter Mignolo
William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies
Duke University

“Coloniality and de-coloniality of knowledge has been one of my permanent and central concerns. Lately, and as a consequence of understanding the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality, I have been reflecting on the grammar of de-coloniality… I have investigated different and seemingly interrelated issues, from history and cartography to religion and political theory, from Latin America to Europe and post-Soviet societies; from Indigenous to Latino/as and Afros in the Americas. In the end, I am a semiotician who abandoned semiotics as a discipline to read the word, the signs and the world.”
(http://waltermignolo.com)

Regards,
Ashley Holmes, Regina Kelly, Jonathan LaGuardia, Katie Silvester, Reena Thomas, and Cassie Wright
New Directions 2010 Co-Chairs
University of Arizona

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:

Caught in the Act: Performance and Performativity is an interdisciplinary graduate conference to be held April 17th at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Performativity is inescapable; we all take part in it. Linguist J.L. Austin's notion of the performative speech act--"I do" in a marriage ceremony, for instance--does rather than describes, a theory that has re-shaped our thinking about the power of language. Immensely productive in its broad, interdisciplinary applications, performativity has influenced projects engaged in configuring identities in non-essentialist ways, as well as focused scholarly attention on how performativity is manifest in everyday and staged performances. Judith Butler's expansion of Austin's performativity to the areas of sex, gender, and subject formation has prompted questions regarding how (or if) regulatory discourse brings subjects into being. Performativity has asked us to consider the extent to which identities are performed and maintained through discourse. What are the political and artistic implications, then, for language and culture? This conference seeks to explore how performativity and performance intersect in everyday behaviors as well as in performances in literature, theatre, language, visual culture, and politics.

We invite submissions from a diverse range of critical perspectives and enthusiastically welcome performance pieces, as well as research that goes beyond the boundaries of a conventional conference paper, including creative responses to this topic, performative papers, and multi-media approaches.

POSSIBLE TOPICS AND POINTS OF ENTRY INCLUDE (BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO):

* Performances in/of literature and language
* Performativity and identity or post-identity (including but not limited to race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and nation)
* Performance and technology or the web, including surveillance technologies
* Subjects of the public and private spheres
* Resistant performances
* Limits and potential of performativity
* The legacy of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
* The iterative versus the authentic
* Affect in/and performance
* Teacher and student identity and performances in or out of the classroom
* Performativity in art and visual culture
* The body and performance or the performative body
* Performances in history and historiography
* Memory or trauma and performance
* Social dramas and the performativity of everyday life
* Speech as performative
* Social protest performance
* Political discourse and the performative
* Performativity and the reader or audience
* The politics of translation
* Performativity and metaphorical thinking/poetics

WAYS TO PARTICIPATE:

* Participate as part of a proposed panel
* Present an individual paper
* Present a performance or creative piece

DEADLINE AND SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS:

We will accept three different types of submissions:

1) Individual papers, including performative papers: please submit an abstract of 500 words, with your name, paper title, institution, and email address.

2) Panels: please submit an 800 word proposal for an entire panel of presentations (3-4 presenters). Included in this proposal should be abstracts of all presentations, an abstract of the panel itself, title of the panel, and information for each presenter (name, paper title, institution, and email address). If you are forming your own panel, you have the option of providing your own chair.

3) Performances and creative presentations/panels: we welcome submission of creative works, including creative writing, visual art, and dramatic performance. Please include a brief description of your project, as well as your name, project title, institution, and email address.

All submitters: In your submission, please inform us if you need a data or video projector. For individual papers or creative presentations, the conference committee will work to place you with other papers dealing with similar goals/issues. Paper presentations should run no longer than 15 minutes. Time restraints for presentations within creative panels and performances will be more flexible and will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Please send your submission materials by email or email attachment to the Conference Committee at umassengconf@gmail.com no later than January 23, 2010. See our call online at http://www.umassenglishgrad.com/2010-conference.

The Center for Worker Education at the City College of New York is proud to host its first hip-hop conference, Is Hip-Hop History? As the first hip-hop conference hosted by a worker education program, it aims to provide a forum that features the work of researchers, hip-hop industry practitioners, artists, and working adult students.

The conference invites proposals that explore how conflicting standards and values by artists and others, challenge hip-hop's viability as one of the U.S.’s most important popular cultural forms. We also invite papers that address hip-hops current and potential function among established academic disciplines (education, psychology, history, communication, the arts and social sciences), as well as the role of gender, class and race in assessing the wide range of meaning invested in its various elements. We expect that these bodies of work will appropriately engage and challenge prior scholarship and most importantly, represent the future direction of hip-hop.

Paper, panel and roundtable proposals should be submitted in the form of 200-500 word abstracts by January 2, 2010. Please email paper proposals and C.V. to oran@ccny.cuny.edu.

Submission Guidelines

Interested participants should submit an abstract and bio. Abstracts must be 500 words or less, and they should include the title of the paper, a brief bio and description of your current work and interests, and contact information (name, institutional affiliation, department and e-mail address). All abstracts should be submitted as a Microsoft Word document that includes double-spacing, 12 point Times New Roman font, and a header with your name and page numbers. Conference presentations will be approximately 30 minutes.

Abstracts should either be mailed to The City College Center for Worker Education, ATTN: Elena Romero, 25 Broadway, 7th Floor, New York, New York or sent via e-mail to oran@ccny.cuny.edu. All abstracts must be received by 5:00 p.m. CST on January 2, 2010.

Graduate students working in all areas of humanities studies, including art, film, history, religion, literature, and the performing arts are encouraged to submit abstracts. Papers on a wide variety of subjects will be considered. Topics may include, but not be limited to:
The Life of the Text: Creation, Reception, and Explication
(how texts are produced, read, or investigated)
Creation: conditions of composition and inspiration
Reception: seeing the text/reading the text
Explication: practices and examples of scholarship on texts
Visual texts/auditory texts/tactile texts
Children as producers or consumers of texts
Film as/and text: the intertextuality between film and other disciplines
History as art/Art as history
Textual lives: biography and bibliography
Ecocriticism: ‘Natural’ explication

Paper titles, 50 word abstract, and 250 word paper summaries should be submitted to gradengl@lasierra.edu with the subject line “Natures Conference” by December 1, 2009. A $35 registration fee will be due by January 20, 2010.

NATURES 2010 DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER—Professor Char Miller
Director, Environmental Analysis Program—Pomona College
W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis

Plenary address: “Streetscape Environmentalism:
Flood Control and Social Justice in the American Southwest”

Seminar on Academic Writing and Publishing: “Making Book:
Gifford Pinchot and the Historian’s Craft”

The Center for Global Nonkilling, an organization working to promote change toward the measurable goal of a killing-free world, is launching in January 2010 its “Global Nonkilling Working Papers” series. The collection will published in a regular basis both on print and online, with all contribution been made freely accessible through its website. The series will incorporate original scientific works that tackle issues related to the construction of nonkilling societies, where killing, threats to kill and conditions conductive to killing are absent. Extension should be within the 10,000 to 20,000 word range.
For a comprehensive list of possible research topics download the two following publications: “Toward a Nonkilling Paradigm” (2009) and “Nonkilling Global Political Science” (2002; 2009). Both available for free download at: http://nonkilling.org/node/18

Before and after 9/11: American Literature and Visual Culture
A one-day conference at the University of Leicester
Friday 18 June 2010

The twenty-year span from the end of the Cold War to 2009, a period that has 9/11 almost at its mid-point, has been a fertile one for American literature. Especially in the wake of 9/11 and the “war on terror” writers have re-engaged with politics: recent writing has commented on Guantanamo, the political responses to 9/11, the war of image and rhetoric waged by the government against the American people and America’s role in Iraq. Environmental and cultural policies have also seen increased attention. Political decisions after 9/11 have had an undeniable impact on contemporary literature and visual representation, but can these art-forms exert any influence in return?

The relationship between word and image has also come under examination in this period of reassessment. A generation of creative and critical thinkers have begun to chart the difficult moral and ethical territory of the responsibilities inherent in any act of representation after 9/11. Critics argue that political responses to 9/11 have created a ‘Culture of Fear’ that “limits our intellectual and moral capacities, it turns us against others, it changes our behavior and perspective”[1] This culture has encouraged acts of resistance in both literary and visual expression.

We invite papers that investigate any aspect of American literature’s engagement with the politics surrounding 9/11, from Canada and Latin America as well as the United States. We are especially interested in papers that explore formal and ideological developments in American writing across this period, either through the investigation of changing priorities and themes or through developments in the work of specific authors, and in those that look at the impact of visual culture on American writing.

Papers could address:

• American writing and/or visual culture after 9/11
• The use of word and image to manipulate public opinion
• Responses to the images of 9/11 and the Iraq war
• Writing about the environment or the construction of cultural memory
• Resistance through formal innovation
• The theory and ethics of representation after 9/11

Please submit 200 word proposals for 20 minute papers to Emma Kimberley (ek36@le.ac.uk) by 30th January 2010.

Call for papers

Saving Private Reels

Presentation, appropriation and re-contextualisation of the amateur moving image

An international conference at University College Cork, Ireland
17-18 September 2010

Often underrated as a private and, thus, socially irrelevant phenomenon, and equally dismissed in aesthetic terms or at least confined to the domain of amateur pictorialism, in the 1960s the home movie became central to the personal, subjective avant-garde and experimental filmmaking of New American Cinema. The practice of incorporating private home movies in experimental film and video resurfaced powerfully over the past decades, with artists such as Alan Berliner, Péter Forgács, Rea Tajiri, Daniel Reeves and Michelle Citron, among many others.

The socio-political impact of which private footage is potentially capable is epitomized by the most complete and most viewed recording of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, filmed on 8mm by Abraham Zapruder on November 22, 1963, as well as by more recent examples, such as the beating of Rodney King, videotaped in Los Angeles by bystander George Holliday on March 2, 1991, which played an important part in triggering the Los Angeles riots of 1992.

Even films that do not happen to capture significant events and historical moments, but focus instead on domestic settings, private occasions or everyday scenes in the public sphere have now become valuable documents of the customs, values, identities, practices, rituals and historical realities of generations of amateur filmmakers. What makes them so relevant today is precisely what previously relegated them – their ephemeral, private and subjective nature.

As a result of the waning of authority and objectivity as compelling social narratives, alternative, subjective and contingent accounts of reality have become more appealing. The proliferation of amateur videos and video-diaries on the Internet testifies to the strength and intensity of the phenomenon. In parallel, the humanities have registered an ever-growing interest in self-representation, first-person narratives and practices of memorialization that go beyond official historiography. The success of recent non-fictions such as Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation has once again demonstrated the eloquence and power of private images when used for purposes of historical and cultural investigation and of self-scrutiny and representation.

This conference aims to explore the pressing issues of the use, presentation, appropriation and re-contextualisation of the amateur moving image, of our relationship with it, both historically and today, and of the senses and meanings of its encounters with a variety of contexts, technologies and discourses.

Papers of the duration of 20 minutes and pre-organized panels of up to 4 papers can address the following or related aspects and issues:

• (Re)presentation and the archive
• Private document, memory, memorialization
• The first-person documentary and autobiographical cinema
• The personal on the Internet: YouTube, Videoblogs
• Amateur footage meets art film
• Orphan films
• The re-contextualization of amateur footage in fiction and documentary
• Amateur form and aesthetics
• Capturing the Zeitgeist, making history: amateur newsreels
• Representing the family
• Imagining the nation, imagining the self
• Leisure and pleasure and the touristic gaze
• Amateur filmmaking and modernity
• The banal, the commonplace, the repetitious
• Audiences and reception
• Reflections of class, ideology and society
• From 8mm to digital: evolution of amateur technologies
• Identities, sexualities, genders
• Amateur fictions, amateur genres
• Shooting on the edge: guerrilla filmmaking
• Self-censoring and selection

Confirmed keynote speaker: Patricia Zimmerman, Professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, USA, author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana, 1995) and co-editor of Mining The Home Movie: Excavations In Histories and Memories (California, 2008)

Submissions: Panel and single paper proposals (abstracts of 300/500 words plus short bibliography) should be sent to the following email address, along with a brief biographical note, by the deadline of February 8th 2010 : ucchomemovies@gmail.com

Conference homepage: For further information and for updates visit our homepage,
http://www.ucc.ie/en/filmstudies/research/conferences/amateur/

Organizers: Dr Barry Monahan, Dr Laura Rascaroli, Dr Gwenda Young (University College Cork, Ireland)

A multi-disciplinary conference on Geoffrey Chaucer will be held in the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland on 19th-20th May 2010. Proposals for papers on any aspect of Chaucer’s work, life, milieu, influence, etc. are welcome. Individual sessions will be framed around the themes that emerge from the call for papers.

Key-note papers will be given by

Professor Alastair Minnis of Yale University
Professor Helen Phillips, Cardiff University
Professor John Thompson, Queen’s University, Belfast

Please send a 200-word proposal by 25th January 2010

The 4th Christina conference explores the complex connections among gender, nature and culture. Recent research has increasingly viewed nature and culture as inherently entangled and inseparable, suggesting that nature is often understood through discourses of gender and, conversely, that gender is made sense of through historically contingent assumptions about nature. Building on this growing body of scholarship, the conference asks how this mutual intertwining of nature, culture and gender has been theorized, represented and experienced in the past as well as the present. The conference aims to be a meeting point for researchers from different disciplines. The conference is organized by the research project “Representing and Sensing Nature, Landscape and Gender” (Academy of Finland) and Gender Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland.

The conference has three thematic foci:
• We explore how advances in genomics, evolutionary biology and other fields of science have refashioned cultural discourses of gender, and how cultural representations of gender and nature have changed the ways in which scientific projects are formulated or popularized.
• We ask how works of art (in visual arts, literature, film, etc.) have imagined and rethought gendered assumptions implicit in the conceptual distinction between nature and culture that has been so prominent in Western culture.
• We focus on everyday experiences and the ways in which daily practices reinforce or challenge cultural assumptions about the connection between gender and nature.

While addressing these issues, we also explore how assumptions
about gender, nature and culture take shape through discourses of sexuality, ethnicity and other intersecting categories of difference.

Keynote speakers
Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Sarah Franklin, London School of Economics, UK
Marja-Liisa Honkasalo, Linköping University, Sweden
Priscilla Wald, Duke University, USA

The Organizing Committee is pleased to invite abstracts for individual 20-minute presentations. The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2009. For more information, please visit www.helsinki.fi/kristiina-instituutti/conference or contact us at christina-conference@helsinki.fi

PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF POPULAR CULTURE:
SPACES AND CONTEXTS.
4th International SELICUP Conference

Palma de Mallorca, Spain
20-22 October 2010

SELICUP, the Spanish Association of Literary Studies in Popular Culture, is pleased to announce its 4th international conference to be held at the University of the Balearic Islands in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The global topic chosen for the conference is “Past, present and future of popular culture: spaces and contexts”.
SELICUP was born with the aim of becoming a forum for scientific exchange between teachers and researchers sharing an enthusiasm for the study of popular culture in and outside Spain. The 4th International SELICUP Conference, to be held in Palma de Mallorca, a meeting point for cultures and languages on the Mediterranean, intends to continue with the work done by SELICUP up to now and to open lines of debate about the new realities of culture(s) in the globalised world.
Through a selection of papers, roundtable discussions, and keynote addresses, debates will be held around the present, past, and future of our fields of study and the cultural products that inspire them.
Proposals are to be submitted by 15 May 2010. The conference will prioritise the following thematic lines although proposals relating to any of the diverse SELICUP interests will also be considered:

■ Popular culture and teaching
-Methodological approaches fostering the use of popular culture as a teaching tool
-‘Culture’ vs ‘culture’: perpetuation in society, deconstruction in teaching?
-Cultural studies: its place in the education system and Academia
-Educational reforms and popular culture

■ Popular culture in the globalisation era: local identities
-The effects of globalisation on popular culture
-Popular culture and the audiovisual media
-The demands of local cultures and identities in the 21st century
-New forms of popular culture in the globalised world
-Birth, development and local adaptation of ‘slow’ movements

■ Theoretical frameworks for the study of popular culture
-Poststructuralist, postmodern and postcolonial views on popular culture
-Theoretical articulations of culture. Key voices and critical debates
-Cultural theory/ies and practice/s

■ Minorities/multiculturalism: deconstruction in popular culture
-Appropriation, subversion, deconstruction in/of popular culture
-Representations of the subaltern in popular culture
-The subaltern and popular culture consumption
-Effects of multiculturalism on hegemonic cultures

■ Language and popular culture
-Movements for the revitalisation and defence of minority languages and cultures, as well non-standard language varieties
-Manufacturing of languages or sub-languages in the fight for cultures and identities
-Language-contact situations

■ Tourism and popular culture
-The representation of cultural identity in tourist promotion: stereotyping, exoticising, otherness
-Tourism and communities in contact: development and transformation of popular culture
-Tourism and its impact on the visitor: travel literature

Proposals for papers, roundtables and workshops are to be submitted online by 15 May 2010. Please follow the cfp link on the conference website www.selicup2010.org and follow the instructions. It must be noted that delegates may only submit a maximum of 2 different proposals.

Conference paper proposals should include a title, a 300-word abstract (including bibliographical references, if applicable) and a 100-word bio-note. Please note that presentations should not exceed 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes’ discussion time.

Roundtable proposals should include a 1000-word abstract. This will briefly state the aims and feature a summary of each speaker’s presentation as well as a list of key bibliographical references. Please note that three is the minimum number of speakers per round table.

Workshop proposals should include a 1000-word abstract. This should briefly state aims, structure, and a list of key bibliographical references. Workshops will be allotted 90-minute slots and should always remain essentially practical in nature and foster audience participation.

The official conference languages will be English, Spanish and Catalan.

For further information please visit www.selicup2010.org.

Call for Papers for the Annual American Comparative
Literature Association Conference which will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, on April 1-4, 2010.

Please circulate the following call for papers for the Annual American
Literature Association Conference which will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, on April 1-4, 2010.

To submit a paper proposal for this seminar, "The Possibility / Impossibility of a National Cinema," please go to . Proposals need to be submitted by November 13, 2009. If you have questions about the seminar, please contact me at or .

The Possibility / Impossibility of a National Cinema

* Seminar Organizer: Ozgur Cicek, SUNY Binghamton

Within the complexities of globalization and immense mobilization, cinema, more than anything else moves across boundaries and travels the world in international film festivals. At that point, national cinematic codes (if there is a way to define a cinematic code as national?) and cultural commodities, cross boundaries, reach diasporas, interact with different codes of narration and create the grounds for transnational cinema. However, this definition ignores the question of the possibility or the impossibility of a national cinema within specific borders, and under specific titles like “British Cinema”, “German Cinema” or “Turkish Cinema”. From this standpoint, this seminar will explore the current dynamics in national cinemas. We will focus on the films of diasporic filmmakers, subnational ethnic communities, co-productions and discuss how these films complicate matters about the term “national cinema.”

Suggested paper topics include but are not limited to:

* National and transnational cinema
* Diasporic Film-making
* Cinema and ethnicity
* Transnational and international stardom
* Foreign language film-making
* Bilingual or multilingual film-making
* Co-productions – international productions
* Auteur cinema as national cinema
* Genre and mid-genre
* Copyright and distribution

"Going Green from the Black Perspective: The Significance of Environmental Issues in the Black Community" is a one-day conference devoted to exploring the various ways Black activists, scholars, agriculturalists, and politicians have been (and are) currently responding to environmental issues within communities of color. At this time we are accepting papers that examine a variety of issues linked to environmentalism such as 1. the impact of toxic dump sites in urban communities, 2. the black community's involvement with green initiatives from the grassroots level to the international stage, 3. the relationship between environmentalism and activism within the black community, or 4. educating children of color about the vulnerability of the planet. Other topics will be taken into consideration.
The conference will take place on the campus of Stony Brook University on Feb 25th, 2010. Scheduled keynote speaker is noted environmentalist Simran Sethi.

Please send your 300 word abstracts along with a cv by Dec 10, 2009 to:
Dr. Walters
Stony Brook University
Dept of Africana Studies
SBS 257
Stony Brook, NY 11794

or email to:

twalters@notes.sunysb.edu
or walterstracey@hotmail.com

Southwest/Texas Popular & American Culture Associations 31st Annual Conference
Albuquerque, NM February 10-13, 2010
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
330 Tijeras
 Albuquerque, NM 87102
Phone: 1.505.842.1234
Fax: 1.505.766.6710. Priority Registration rate available until December 15, 2009.

Panels now forming on topics related to California Culture: literature, ethnography, film, pop culture, folk culture, history and historical figures, art, artifacts, photography, industries, geography, archeology, journalism, etc. If it has to do with California, we’re interested! Native and Hispanic Cultures in California; California in literature or literature from Californians; California in film, television, recordings, etc.; Car culture, celebrity culture, beat and hip culture, folklore, the list goes on and on.

Scholars, teachers, professionals, and others interested in California are encouraged to participate. Graduate students are also particularly welcome with award opportunities for best graduate papers.

If you wish to form your own California-focused panel, I would be glad to facilitate your needs. Also, if your work does not focus on California but fits within the broad range of areas designated for the upcoming conference on American & Popular culture, I still encourage you to participate. Please pass along this call to friends and colleagues.
Send 100-200 word abstracts and proposals for panels by December 15, 2009:

Monica Ganas, California Culture Chair
Azusa Pacific University
mganas@apu.edu
(626) 815-6000 x 5460
For general information and online registration, contact
pcaacaswtx@sbcglobal.net (updated regularly)

Papers are invited on any topic related to "teaching the eighteenth century" for a panel at SCSECS this February (25-27). Please send a short abstract and contact information to Mary Ann Rooks (mrooks @kent.edu) before December 1.

I'm looking to put together a panel at the Philological Association of the Carolinas conference, held here in beautiful Charleston, SC, March 11-13, 2010 (see original cfp: http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/34343).
Melancholy has long been studied as part of a British Romantic tradition--one need only think of Adonais, Manfred, and a host of solitary Romantic individuals--but under-studied in an international context. How do other "Romanticisms" value the melancholy individual, or even melancholy as a concept? How do continental philosophies and/or cultural influences shape "melancholy"? Or, on a broader level, how does an international approach change or complicate accepted anglophone definitions of Romanticism?
Please email your proposals, a brief abstract, and your c.v. to rogerskb@cofc.edu by November 5, 2009.

Papers are sought for the following seminar:

Mediterranean Encounters

A space historically marked by cosmopolitanism and diaspora, the Mediterranean has developed in the course of history as a prime site for the study of cultural translation as well as transnational interactions and contestations between various traditions and spaces. This seminar proposes to reveal the Mediterranean as a hybrid site where histories of conflicting geo-political imperatives and asymmetrical power relations co-exist with obliterated narratives of transcultural subjectivities and cosmopolitan cultural genealogies. Through an investigation of various sites of friction and interaction in the Mediterranean basin and of the criss-crossings that have connected them at different moments in history, this panel aims to reveal alternative dynamics of historical and cultural affiliations (real or imaginary) as well as margin-to-margin circuits of production that critically engage with the dyadic logic of Eurocentric modernity and empire (North vs. South; Europe vs. the Islamic World) and cold war politics (East vs. West). Discussing various representations of the Mediterranean—as a group of micro-cultures, a crucible between religions, languages, and traditions, or a contact zone where differences can be both predicated and defused- this seminar seeks papers that address the modalities of Mediterranean encounters from a wide range of disciplines, national literatures, and theoretical approaches. Proposals ranging from the medieval period to the present are welcome, as are abstracts focusing on music, visual arts, and other media.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
-Symbolic geographies
-Transcultural subjectivities/cosmopolitanism
-Literary syncretism
-Textuality and translation
-Hybridity and liminality
-Diaspora and collective memory

Please send 250-word abstracts by November 13th directly to ACLA (http://www.acla.org/submit/). Select "Mediterranean Encounters" from scroll down menu.

The ACLA’s annual conferences have a unique structure in which most papers are grouped into 9-12 person seminars that meet two hours per day, for the three days of the conference, in order to foster discussion. Some 8-person seminars meet the first two days of the conference. Previous conference programs that show this structure are available at the ACLA website. The conference will also include plenary sessions, workshops, a business meeting, a banquet, and other events in downtown New Orleans and on the Tulane campus.

This year the conference will be held in lovely St. Louis, Missouri from March 31 to April 3 at the Renaissance Grand Hotel St. Louis, 800 Washington Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri(314) 621 9600 1 (800) HOTELS-1 (800 468-3571). Please see the official web-site for more information at http://www.pcaaca.org/conference/national.php. Contemporary Southern literature remains a growing area for further/future discussion(s) and criticism(s) within the context of society. This CFP seeks contributors offering a wide variety of interpretations and criticisms of contemporary Southern literature and culture against the backdrop of popular culture and postmodern society, although other approaches are also solicited. Presentations covering a broad range of Southern literature pieces, critical approaches, and cultural interpretations are welcome; presentations should be developed for a 15-minute reading. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
• Any new and rising Southern literary work
• Contrasts between Flannery O'Connor's and other contemporary author's work
• Explication of canonical work
• Film and television work depicting Southern Culture
• Southern literature in the age of postmodernism
• Gender roles in contemporary work
• Religion and/or feminist themes
• Southern Nostalgia and History
• New readings of traditionally-accepted Southern literature
• Film explications (discussion of traditionally “southern” elements)
• Anything dealing with Southern literature or culture
• Comparative readings.
• Home Remedies
• Legends
• Biography
These are only suggestions, and all approaches and subjects are welcome and appreciated. Film, art, archival histories, oral histories, anything, basically, is open to discussion. The goal is to learn more about the South and its parameters. Please be open and creative with the items you propose; all submissions concerning popular culture are considered. Additionally, if you have a panel that deserves special attention, please let me know in your letter or email so I can recommend it to the PCA administration. Basically, anything dealing with the South is fair game—film, novels, stories, poetry, theory, recipes, etc., anything remotely Southern fits the bill! Please submit a no more than a 250-word abstract to Dr. Christopher Bloss, Area Chair, by December 15, 2009. Contributors will be notified by email within two business days of submission. The conference takes place March 31 through April 3. Please submit an email abstract (Word or RTF only) to: chris.bloss@gmail.com. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions or require additional information.
• Graduate students are highly encouraged to apply. This is not simply a forum for seasoned professionals, although they are also welcome, but a place to experience the art of scholarly presentation in a comfortable environment. Information about hotel reservations and conference registration may be found at the conference web-site. Check the conference web-site as the time grows closer at http://pcaaca.org/conference/national.php Please provide title of paper, school affiliation (if any), email address, and phone number. These will only be used in case we absolutely need to contact you. Sincerely, Chris,
-- Dr. Christopher R. Bloss
chris.bloss@gmail.com

This is a call for papers for the fall 2009 Humanities Review, a literary journal for the St. John’s University English Department in Queens, NY.

Our current theme focuses on the polyvalent agencies at play within the construction of contemporary American Identity.

We are also strongly requesting cover art submissions that best exemplify the theme. Cover art open to drawing, painting, photography, and digital art. Limited color or mono-chrome are preferred. Please submit .TIFF FILES ONLY @ 800 dpi to the email address below.

Some matters to consider:

How does the American practice of “nation” converse with the destructive colonial impulses of past Empires such as Rome and Great Britain? How can we use literature to see the transference of these ideas?

In what ways can we look to ameliorate the kitschy stigma of “America” in a Post-9/11 landscape?
How has the social practice of culture formed / continue to form the ideological condition of “being American?” With that said, what does it mean to be an American in the 21st Century? What are the ontological pieces that plait our parsonage?

How do you see American visual culture as reifying the American historical repository? Particularly with advertising media that in its polysemous state is most imbued with meaning, how does our interaction with such forms help us create our priorities and manufacture our delight?

To what degree is the American Identity defined by a national literature? What complicates this part of the nation's Identity? For example, is time or nationality of author a factor in relevance to the nation as a whole?

The American Identity is a working paradox. How do the ever-increasing minority ethnic groups and overall intermixing cooperate with/negate the stereotypical White Anglo majority?

As America is often characterized as a nation of immigrants and the Identity usually references a past (sometimes distant) foreign ethnic origin, are there any true Americans?

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

The deadline for all submissions is NOVEMBER 1ST, 2009.

All essays are to be limited to 15 single-spaced pages with 12 pt. Times New Roman Font. MLA citation style only. Please submit essays via email to sjuhumanities@gmail.com or via snail mail to:

The Humanities Review
c/o The Writing Center
St. John's University
8000 Utopia Parkway
Queens, NY 11439

Thanks and good luck!

The deadline for the Winter Issue, “Politics and Literature” of the Pennsylvania Literary Journal is extended until November 10th. The last few months revealed great news for this new publication. It will be listed in the MLA International Bibliography and the MLA Directory of Periodicals in December. EBSCO Humanities International Complete will make the critical essays available to a wide academic audience. We are also listed on the Electronic Collection of Library and Archives Canada. The business is registered in Pennsylvania. The first Summer Issue, “Experiments,” is numbered, ISSN 2151-3066. A connected project, the “Abolitionist Women Writers Archive,” http://sites.google.com/site/abolitionistwomen, will be included in the Poetess Collection, which in exchange will help the Editor improve the website for inclusion in the Nines.org database. We also just received our first donation, and hope that donations for the Winter Issue will cover the $35 copyrights fee. The peer-review board is hard at work over the next publication. We received submissions of better quality in this round, but too few critical essays, so the deadline is being expended.

Classical authors frequently blended politics with fiction. Dumas and Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, Stowe, Dickens and Twain’s abolitionist agenda, Swift’s sarcastic and the realists’ and naturalists’ melancholic anti-poverty and corruption stands, Cooper’s plea for the rights of the Native Americans, and Conrad’s protest against colonialism are some examples of canonical encounters between the causes of social justice and literary interpretations or portrayals of the ills that plague humanity. Essays on the edges and even outside of this topic will be welcomed as well, but, those that explore it will be given priority. All literary periods from the beginning of written thought to the present day are relevant. The writers studied can be from any nation, gender, sexual orientation and the like. Please do translate all foreign words in endnotes into English, so that your English-speaking readers can understand every word of your argument. Poetry does not need to have a political slant, but political poetry is especially coveted. Critical essays should only have Endnotes, rather than Footnotes. The preferred reference style is the Chicago Manual of Style, as it is easier to read in a hypertext file. If you have an unformed or uncertain idea, do send a query with questions to the Editor, Anna Faktorovich at pennsylvaniajournal@gmail.com. Emailed submissions are preferred. They can also be mailed to Anna Faktorovich, 1800 Lisa Dr., #2, Indiana, PA 15701. The Editor’s Career Portfolio can be found at, http://sites.google.com/site/annafaktorovich.

The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies invites papers for a panel on critical reevaluations of Asian American literature before 1970. According to Kandice Chuh, Asian American studies initially relied on claiming America as a nation to contest racist essentialism. But more recently, shifts in Asian American studies towards transnational analyses demand more complex responses to early Asian American texts. For example, literature previously dismissed as Orientalist might be recuperated as complex responses to both subnational and transnational affiliations. Or canonical texts of Asian American literature might be re-situated in the context of a more open genealogy of precursors. Additionally, reperiodization, different conceptions of time and the question of American neo-imperialism might all justify new approaches to how Asian American texts should be understood as literary history. Topics might include understudied early 20th century American writers of Asian descent, writers of various ethnicities that are important to Asian American studies, or possibly corrective readings of well-known figures. Please submit CVs and 250-350 word abstracts by December 31, 2009 to Merton Lee, merton733@gmail.com or mlee53@illinois.edu.

Literary London 2010

Representations of London in Literature: An Interdisciplinary Conference

Hosted by the Institute of English Studies, University of London

Organised by the University of Northampton, Kingston University, London, and the Institute of English Studies, University of London

7-9th July 2010

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Professor Michael Slater (Birkbeck, University of London)

Professor Susan Alice Fischer (Medgar Evers College, City University of New York)

Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck, University of London)

Proposals by 31st March 2010

The 9th Annual Literary London conference will be hosted by the Institute of English Studies, University of London. The Institute is located in Bloomsbury, at the centre of literary London, and just a few minutes walk from such attractions as the British Library, the British Museum, and the clubs, pubs, and restaurants of Soho. It is at the heart of London: one of the world's major cities with a long and rich literary tradition reflecting both its diversity and its significance as a cultural and commercial centre. Literary London 2010 aims to:

• Read literary and dramatic texts in their historical and social context and in relation to theoretical approaches to the study of the metropolis.
• Investigate the changing cultural and historical geography of London.
• Consider the social, political, and spiritual fears, hopes, and perceptions that have inspired representations of London.
• Trace different traditions of representing London and examine how the pluralism of London society is reflected in London literature.
• Celebrate the contribution London and Londoners have made to English literature and drama.

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers which consider any period or genre of literature about, set in, inspired by, or alluding to central and suburban London and its environs, from the city’s roots in pre-classical times to its imagined futures. While the main focus of the conference will be on literary texts, we actively encourage interdisciplinary contributions relating film, architecture, geography, theories of urban space, etc., to literary representations of London. Papers from postgraduate students are especially welcome for consideration. While proposals on all topics are encouraged, this year we would especially welcome paper or panel proposals on the theme of ‘centrality’. Topics that might be addressed are:

• Representations of London’s position as a literary, cultural, social, and economic centre
• Literature and power, political and cultural
• Court literature and parliamentary literature
• Money and writing
• The relationship between the metropolis and its others
• The centre as a zone of sociability
• Literary clubs and cabals
• City-centre literature and inner-city literature
• ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford’
• ‘London is the place to be’
• ‘things fall apart: the centre cannot hold’

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers by Wednesday 31 March 2010 to: contact@literarylondon.org. Your proposal should contain your name, your institutional affiliation, your email and postal addresses, the title of your proposed paper, and an abstract of no more than 300 words.

Proposals for comprised panels of three speakers are also welcome. Proposals for panels should contain the proposer’s name, institutional affiliation, email and postal addresses, and an abstract of the panel of no more than 500 words. You must also include a name, institutional affiliation, email address, and paper title for each of your speakers. You do not need to provide separate abstracts for each of the papers.

Literary London Organising Committee: Dr Lawrence Phillips (University of Northampton) and Dr Brycchan Carey (Kingston University, London).

Please direct any queries related to this conference to: contact@literarylondon.org.

The Annual Literary London conference is mutually supportive of the e-journal of the same name.

Web site: www.literarylondon.org

Email: contact@literarylondon.org

This seminar seeks to identify how and why contemporary literature uses visual works of art (murals, montages, sculpture, paintings, photography, etc) as a means of interpretation. How does the translation of a visual piece into textual form affect both the verbal and the visual expressions? With a particular interest in inter-arts encounters that are cross-cultural in nature, we ask: How does the textualisation of art affect its reception? Does using art in crosscultural works add to or diminish its value as a cultural representation? Does textualization permit the representation of more than one culture? Does reinterpretation involve the loss of an essence, or a change? What is the role of the reader?

This seminar seeks to explore connections and tensions between discourses of the body and discourses of diaspora, migration, exile, and transnationality. How do processes of migration challenge or expand our understandings of corporeality? How do the conditions of corporeality challenge or expand our understandings of migration? How is the body shaped or defined by experiences of border-crossing? How is the nation or community shaped or defined by the bodies that enter or leave it, bidden and unbidden? How do migration and diaspora intersect with gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability? All temporal and geographical foci welcome.

This is a seminar (a panel that meets for approximately 2 hours on two to three consecutive days) at the American Comparative Literature Association 2010 Meeting in New Orleans, April 1-4, 2009. The 2010 theme is "Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms." It is not necessary to be a member of the ACLA to submit a proposal, but all accepted presenters must become members to participate in the conference.

250-word proposals due November 13, 2009. All proposals must be submitted through the conference website at http://www.acla.org/acla2010/.

The French Graduate Student Association of Columbia University is
pleased to announce a new issue of its graduate student journal on the subject of:

Consumption: Pleasures of the Text, Materiality, and Cultural Practices

In Book Six of The Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau highlights the parallels between consuming books and food: "(...) reading while I eat has always been one of my little treats, in which I indulge when I have no one to talk to. It makes up for the missing company. I devour, by turns, a page and then a mouthful: it is as though my book were dining with me." The eating and drinking of which Rousseau speaks is but one aspect of consumption: to consume can signify nourishment, pleasure and equality on the one hand and deterioration, excess and annihilation on the other. The plural, even contradictory nature of consumption is manifested in the polemical stances that artists, writers, scholars and courts of law have adopted in regards to consumption in literature. From Rousseau's fantasy of simultaneously nourishing the body and mind, to the attempts of the French State to protect its citizens from the dangers it perceived as inherent in the act of reading books such as Madame Bovary, literature, as a consumable object, has alternately been seen as vital and affirming, and as potentially harmful.

In this conference we will reflect on relationships between
consumption and culture. What are the sites, modes and practices of consumption? How are these sites at once represented in and shaped by literature? Does literature itself fall within the field of commodity culture, or rather does it act as an independent guarantor of cultural authenticity? What makes literature such a fraught object of consumption, subject to such legal restrictions as copyright and censorship? What is the relationship between the consumer, the producer and the product consumed, or rather between the reader, the writer and the text? How do new media and technology influence the production and consumption of cultural forms?

We welcome articles of 15-25 pages in French or English addressing this topic within any period of French and Francophone literary history. Perspectives from other disciplinary fields and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged. Please submit your paper with title and contact information (name, affiliation, email address) by March 15, 2010 to epitextes@gmail.com. This issue is being prepared in conjuction with this year's FGSA graduate student conference (to be held Friday, March 5, 2010), about which more information can be found here: http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/34527

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

Literary Consumption
- The reader as a consumer
- Representations of food, sex and money
- Cinematic and visual representations of consumption

Societal Consumption
- Colonization and exploitation
- Consumption and gender
- Consumer identity

Models of Consumption
- Political conceptualizations: capitalism, Marxism, globalization
- Anti-consumption and the avant-garde
- Consumption and Twentieth Century French Theory

Regulating Consumption
- Censorship, legal & regulatory structures
- Exchange and barter
- Social mores of consumption

Transformations in Consumption
- Democratization of literature
- Impact of new media, technology

The Columbia French Graduate Student Association is pleased to announce the inaugural issue of its journal of graduate work, Épitextes, on the subject of:

“Circulation”: Networks, Knowledge and the Literary

In his article “Pouls” for Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedia, Ménuret de Chambaud propagated circulation as the sine qua non of health. Part of a project largely defined by its attempt to create a large system of knowledge and to be propagated to as many as possible, this article, pivotal in the debate between Cartesians and Mechanists, can in this sense be said to act as a part mirroring the whole, and exemplifies the polyvalent utility of the concept of circulation for the literary scholar. Blood circulation, the creation and role of knowledge networks in the dissemination of ideas, and the interaction between the eastern and western worlds are but a few examples of the ramifications of this concept. The way in which literary texts affect or ought to affect individuals’ relations to one another, be distributed among those individuals, and whom they ought to reach has fueled rivalries, inflamed tirades and informed national policy. From before the Aeneid’s celebration of Roman nobility and valor to Malraux’s Ministry of Culture and beyond, how a literary creation should circulate has been the business of writers and readers. This year’s FGSA conference hopes to explore how this business has affected and continues to affect French or Francophone texts and their study.

Equally important (and contentious) have been authors’ own attitudes towards the dissemination of their work, and those works’ representation of the circulation of ideas. Some texts are intended to behave as viruses on their audience, circulating throughout the system until passed on to the next host, as Sade’s unique blend of the erotic and the politically subversive, while some others seem more predisposed to sustain themselves within the cerebral frames of a few lecteurs avertis, exemplified by Mallarmé’s notorious impenetrability. What parameters drive a writer to seek or shun notoriety and what does the result entail for a text’s posterity?

Finally, and from the reader’s perspective, how well a text circulates and its relation to other texts has also been a central literary concern. A major pillar of literary history (and analysis) has for some time been the understanding of a text’s contexts and references. Also, how far a text has traveled and how much it has been commented has often determined its success or infamy, at least in part. Throughout history theologians have been equally prompt to tout their scriptures’ ubiquity or esoteric status as proof of their faiths; likewise, success or failure in globalized markets plays an ambivalent but significant role in current readers’ evaluation of a text’s integrity or desirability.

We invite graduate students from all disciplines to help us extract some of the more notable ways in which circulation has placed its stamp upon French literature. Articles of 15-25 pages, submitted electronically to epitextes@gmail.com, with name, email and institutional affiliation, in French or English and dealing with this topic and within any period of French and Francophone literary history will be considered until November 15, 2009. Any and all approaches and perspectives, including from other fields in the humanities, are acceptable, and encouraged.

National Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference Call for Papers
University of South Florida – Tampa, Fl.
March 25-27, 2010

Conference Theme: “Anything But Silence: Politics, Poetry, and Pedagogy”

"Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do?
What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through?
And it is this which frightens me:
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" -- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

All too often, hegemony silences marginalized groups, thus taking away their agency. However, pockets of conflict always seem to surface, voicing resistance and creating an alternate viewpoint. The "Anything but Silent" conference seeks to examine these voices of resistance, traversing all disciplines and topics.

We are seeking papers that address cultural or social impositions of silence and that examine how those impositions are rejected or resisted. Conference presenters are encouraged to investigate the various intersections of “silence” within their specific area(s) of study. For instance, conference presenters could examine the politics, poetry and/or pedagogy within literature, film studies, education/pedagogy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, biology, medicine, history, American studies, political science, international studies, environmentalism and sustainability, or religious studies.

Please send 250-500 word abstracts to usf.egsa.conference@gmail.com by December 15, 2009.

Visit the conference website for registration details and the complete conference program: http://sites.google.com/site/usfconference2010/

Hosted by the USF English Graduate Student Association at the University of South Florida

National Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference Call for Papers
University of South Florida – Tampa, Fl.
March 25-27, 2010

Conference Theme: “Anything But Silence: Politics, Poetry, and Pedagogy”

"Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do?
What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through?
And it is this which frightens me:
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" -- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

All too often, hegemony silences marginalized groups, thus taking away their agency. However, pockets of conflict always seem to surface, voicing resistance and creating an alternate viewpoint. The "Anything but Silent" conference seeks to examine these voices of resistance, traversing all disciplines and topics.

We are seeking papers that address cultural or social impositions of silence and that examine how those impositions are rejected or resisted. Conference presenters are encouraged to investigate the various intersections of “silence” within their specific area(s) of study. For instance, conference presenters could examine the politics, poetry and/or pedagogy within literature, film studies, education/pedagogy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, biology, medicine, history, American studies, political science, international studies, environmentalism and sustainability, or religious studies.

Please send 250-500 word abstracts to usf.egsa.conference@gmail.com by December 15, 2009.

Visit the conference website for registration details and the complete conference program: http://sites.google.com/site/usfconference2010/

Hosted by the USF English Graduate Student Association at the University of South Florida

ACLA Seminar: Toward a Gendered Analytics of Diaspora: Interrogating Constructions of Gender and Sexuality in Diasporic Cultural Productions

ACLA Annual Meeting, April 1-4, 2010
New Orleans, LA

Seminar Description:

In his article “Diasporas,” James Clifford argues that traditional theories of diaspora tend to privilege male experiences by prioritizing traveling over dwelling, displacements over placements; his remedy would be to focus on an alternative of female diasporic experience. Further, Gayatri Gopinath argues in her book, Impossible Desires that the postcolonial queer diasporic body in diasporic cultural productions mobilizes a memory of violence that dominant, exclusionary historiographies of the nation actively erase. In light of such recent expressions of the need to recenter the female and the queer diasporic vantage-points as analytical frames for re-theorizing diaspora, this seminar invites papers on diasporic cultural productions (including fiction, memoirs, and films) which critically engage the lens of gender and/or sexuality to represent diasporic experiences.

Paper topics might include but are not limited to: the female and/or queer diasporic subject as cultural producer and/or as a material-discursive site of counter-memory; relationships between home and travel, domestic and public spaces; tropes of nostalgia and return; constructing the past by writing the self, history, and the nation; intersections among gender/sexuality and class, religion, race, ethnicity, and/or caste.

Please select the seminar title, "Toward a Gendered Analytics of Diaspora: Interrogating Constructions of Gender and Sexuality in Diasporic Cultural Productions" from the drop-down menu on the ACLA submissions website in order to submit 250 word paper proposals no later than November 13. Also, please don't forget to specify your A/V needs (if any) on the submissions website. The ACLA submissions website is as follows:
http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php

If you have any questions, please contact Soumitree Gupta (soumitree.gupta at gmail.com).

For further details of the conference, please see the ACLA website:
http://www.acla.org/acla2010/

Calling All Papers

Fordham University
New York City
February 12, 2010

Sex, Death, and Boredom
Keynote Speaker: Simon Critchley

The Graduate English Association seeks submissions for our annual interdisciplinary conference entitled “Sex, Death, and Boredom.” This year’s one-day conference to be held on February 12, 2010 asks presenters to engage the interconnections amongst sex, death, and boredom and to challenge conventional definitions of each. Due to the importance we place on the thorough interrogation of the topics and the exchange of ideas that can take place amongst scholars of different disciplines in such a venue, we have decided to devote a large portion of every session to discussion. Consequently, each panel will consist of three, possibly four short ten-minute presentations followed by a twenty or thirty minute discussion amongst panelists, conference attendees, and a moderator. It is our hope that these extended discussions will keep the sessions lively while also developing, challenging, and even altering the ideas relayed in the presentations. Our aim in structuring the sessions in such a way is to foster not only the exchange of knowledge but also the very creation of knowledge throughout the conference.

In addition to traditional academic papers, the committee encourages creative literary work, performance art, and multi-media presentations that in some way address the topic. Pre-formed panels will be accepted for review but are not necessary for submission. We are particularly interested in provocative work that will inspire discussion. Possible topics may include:

• Pornography and Boredom
• Boredom and Death
• Necrophilia
• Cultural Constructions of Boredom
• Manifestations of Boredom in Certain Periods in History
• Chapbook Culture and Elicit Material
• Grave Robbing
• Catholic Universities and Sex
• Voyeurism, Participation, and Performance
• Power and Sado-Masochistic Practices
• Boredom and Technology in the 21st Century
• Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation
• Boredom and Anxiety
• Photographs of the Dead
• Séances
• Academia and Boredom

The deadline for submissions is December 12, 2009.

Please send 300-word abstracts of academic papers to sexdeathandboredom@gmail.com.
Word documents only, please.

For creative work, please limit your submission to ten pages (or three to five poems).

A description and/or images of the performance piece may be submitted electronically in a single Word document or by post to:

GEA Conference
Attn: Will Fenton
English Department
Fordham University
Bronx, NY 10458

If you have questions about anything pertaining to the conference or your paper submission, contact Will Fenton at fenton@fordham.edu.