interdisciplinary

In his 2003 collection of essays Deep Gossip, Henry Abelove suggests that queer studies and American studies, at a fundamental level, have always grappled with the same questions and concepts: an interest in the history of democratic culture, an avowal of homosexual desire, an interdisciplinary approach to literature, and the use of literature as a political resource. The eminent foci of nineteenth-century American studies have quite often been the various brands of white, male alienation epitomized by the homosocial and homoerotic literary cultures of Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Thoreau, and other exemplary "proto-queer" figures.

See our Call for Papers/Panels online http://www.ccwwp.ca/conference/2016/cfp

Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs (CCWWP) seeks proposals for panel discussions, forums, readings, presentations, and papers, about:

the art of writing
the pedagogy of teaching writing
the business of writing and publishing
educational and community programs for writers
elements of craft and criticism

47th Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), March 17-20, 2016; Hartford, CT; Host Institution: University of Connecticut
Panel title: Acceleration Toward Post-Human, Post-Antropocene
Panel chair: Dr. Milena Popov (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)
Panel abstract and description:

How do literary forms influence material forms, and how do material forms influence literary forms? This delicious chiasmus foregrounds our inquiry into how writing and its media collide in such a way as to alter them both. Early modern readers and non-readers encountered writing and its products ever more frequently, with new reading publics and a printing press that augmented a sensitivity to writing by increasing the number of letters in the world. The same might be said for objects, with a flood of new, exotic products entering England in this age of exploration. Paper, and especially books, are not the most obvious writing surfaces to early moderns.

Contemporary perspectives on Christianity's role in American Indian communities are diverse and often ambiguous, partly due to this religion's involvement in colonization. While some grassroots traditionalists and many in the activist and academic communities frequently reject Christianity for its role in dismantling American Indian traditions and identities, the past is complex, and the American Indian Christian community is strong and growing. The last two decades have seen its resurgence. Recent works such as Mona Susan Power's Sacred Wilderness Sterlin Harjo's This May Be the Last Time, and The Cherokee Hymnbook: New Edition for Everyone reflect ongoing practices of Christianity in Indian Country today.