interdisciplinary

Fat Studies is becoming an interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary field of study that confronts and critiques cultural constraints against notions of "fatness" and "the fat body"; explores fat bodies as they live in, are shaped by, and remake the world; and creates paradigms for the development of fat acceptance or celebration within mass culture. Fat Studies uses body size as the starting part for a wide-ranging theorization and explication of how societies and cultures, past and present, have conceptualized all bodies and the political/cultural meanings ascribed to every body.

In the current moment of economic and environmental crisis, the concept of sustainability has become a popular touchstone of both neoliberal and conservative agendas. Whether arguing for a green industrial revolution or economic dematerialization, both groups fail to realize the deeper contradictions between sustainability and capitalism's mode of production. But if "we're all environmentalists now," as Neil Smith has suggested, it becomes necessary to engage ecological politics without participating in late capitalism's appropriation of "green" rhetoric.

The 19th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH

Deadline: November 1, 2010

Website: http://bwwc2011.osu.edu

Keynote Speakers: Helen Deutsch and Sharon Marcus

Plenary Panel: Caroline Levine, Sandra Macpherson and Robyn Warhol

"Curiosities"
March 31- April 3, 2011

Call for Papers: Trauma and Literature at CEA 2011

Call for Papers, Trauma and Literature at CEA 2011
March 31- April 2, 2011 | St. Petersburg, Florida
Hilton, St. Petersburg, 333 First Street South, St. Petersburg, FL 33701; (727) 894-5000

In 1927, exactly one hundred years after Goethe first used the term "Weltliteratur," Walter Benjamin returned to Berlin from Moscow. He had spent his time there reporting on developments in Russian literature and film, and he arrived to find that his German translation of Marcel Proust's Within a Budding Grove had been published to strong reviews. Such multi-lingual and multi-national literary undertakings are central to Benjamin's entire corpus. While not a major figure in most narratives of world literature, Benjamin's involvement and theoretical interest in questions of translation, media, and cultural history suggest ways of placing him in these important contexts. But how do we read Benjamin's own reading?