category: medieval

Portals Literary Journal is accepting submissions for our Spring 2012 issue.

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:29:21 -0500

2012 Call for Submissions
Portals is currently accepting submissions for our Spring 2012 issue.

Submission deadline: March 1, 2012.

Portals invites original critical essays and short creative fiction that explore comparative literary topics across cultural, regional, linguistic, and temporal boundaries for the Spring 2012 issue. This edition will be available in scholarly journal listings worldwide.

Formal requirements for original critical essays:

Papers should be in English.
In order to be considered for submission, essays must compare at least two texts from different linguistic traditions.
Citations should include both the original language and the English translation.
Papers should be no longer than 25 pages in 12 point font, and should be properly formatted and documented in MLA style.
Formal requirements for creative fiction:

An author may submit up to 3 pieces of any form of creative fiction with a limit of 10 pages per submission. Fiction must be of a comparative/critical nature.
General requirements:

All submissions are to be sent via e-mail as an MS-Word attachment.
Submissions must include a 250-word abstract and a cover sheet including name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, school affiliation, and current academic standing. Your name should not appear anywhere else in the proposal, since this will be a blind selection process.
Authors should be currently enrolled undergraduate students, graduate students or doctoral candidates.
Submissions must be original and previously unpublished.
To submit, send your submission as a .doc or .rtf attachment to: clsa[at]mail.sfsu.edu

Review Process:

Portals is published once a year in the Spring semester at San Francisco State University, in conjunction with the Comparative Literature Student Association (CLSA). All articles are reviewed in a double-blind process, and authors will be notified by email within 2 to 3 months of the submission deadline.

We encourage authors to read our journal thoroughly before submitting. Portals most recent issue and archives can be found here: http://portalsjournal.com

All inquiries and questions can be directed to our editors at: clsa[at]mail.sfsu.edu

[UPDATE] CFP: Science Fiction/Fantasy/Legend NEPCA (6/1/12; Rochester, NY 10/26-27/12)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:51:02 -0500

CALL FOR PAPERS
SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, AND LEGEND AREA
http://sf-fantasy-legend.blogspot.com/
2012 Conference of The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA)
St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York
26-27 October 2012
Proposals by 1 June 2012

Proposals are invited from scholars of all levels for papers to be presented in the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area. Presentations will be limited to 15-20 minutes in length (depending on final panel size) and may address any aspect of the intermedia genres of science fiction, fantasy, and/or legends as represented in popular culture produced in any country, any time period, and for any audience. Please see our website (http://sf-fantasy-legend.blogspot.com/) for further details and ideas.

If you are interested in proposing a paper or panel of papers, please send a proposal of approximately 300 to 500 words and a one to two page CV to both the Program Chair AND to the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area Chair at the following addresses (please note "SF/Fantasy/Legend Proposal" in your subject line):

Tim Madigan
Program Chair
tmadigan@sjfc.edu

Michael A. Torregrossa
Science Fiction, Fantasy and Legend Area Chair
Popular.Culture.and.the.Middle.Ages@gmail.com

The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA) is a regional affiliate of the American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Association. NEPCA is an association of scholars in New England and New York, organized in 1974 at the University of Rhode Island. We reorganized and incorporated in Boston in 1992. The purpose of this professional association is to encourage and assist research, publication, and teaching on popular culture and culture studies topics by scholars in the northeast region of the United States. By bringing together scholars from various disciplines, both academic and non-academic people, we foster interdisciplinary research and learning. We publish a newsletter twice per year and we hold an annual conference at which we present both the Peter C. Rollins Book Award and an annual prize.

Membership in NEPCA is required for participation. Annual dues are currently $30 for full-time faculty and $15 to all other individuals. Further details are available at http://users.wpi.edu/~jphanlan/NEPCA.html.

[REMINDER] Post-Graduate Student Conference on English Literature and Translation Studies 17-18 May 2012

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:26:36 -0500

English Literature and Translation Studies:
An interdisciplinary/international postgraduate conference
17th-18th May 2012 Cankaya University Ankara
Translation and Interpreting Studies and English Language and Literature Departments at Cankaya University in Ankara warmly invite our colleagues/students to send proposals for a 20-minute paper on English Literature and Translation Studies. This conference welcomes papers centering upon English Language, Translation and Interpreting Studies, Literary Translation, English Literature and Culture, American Literature and Culture, Comparative Literature and Literary and Cultural Theories.
This two-day English Literature and Translation Studies conference seeks to bring colleagues, post-graduate students and academicians together in the friendly atmosphere of Cankaya University.
Submission Guidelines:
• Papers/Posters
A 250 word abstract should be submitted as an email attachment to eltsconferences@gmail.com or elts@cankaya.edu.tr by March 5th, 2012. In your email, please include your name, affiliation, email address, phone number, title of paper, and a brief biographical statement.
For further details please visit: www.elts.cankaya.edu.tr
For all enquiries please do not hesitate to write us an email: eltsconferences@gmail.com

[UPDATE - NEW DATE] Works in Progress: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference, June 1, 2012

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:30:06 -0500

The English Department at the University of Cincinnati invites you to submit proposals for an interdisciplinary academic conference held on June 1, 2012 focusing on the value of sharing works in progress as a means to increase experimentation, build community, and test new ideas. Rather than soliciting finished products from participants, we seek work that shows its seams, represents thinking in action, invites revision, and resists closure. In other words, don’t hide your process; advertise it.

Changing concepts of materiality, influencing everything from mediums to social communication, have highlighted the importance of process to all forms of production. In this spirit, we encourage projects that take process seriously, that understand process—how things are made, how ideas cohere, how writing happens—as a legitimate and compelling object of study. Projects could include but aren’t limited to explorations of the academic and the technical; pedagogical, artistic and scholarly experiments and practices; and reflective, theoretical, rhetorical, creative, or critical works.

We encourage presenters to experiment with the genre of their presentations. Presenters should feel welcome to take advantage of multimodal delivery. Presentations might take the form of a PowerPoint project, a short film, an interactive discussion or workshop, some combination of these, or other possibilities.

Proposals for individual and panel presentations might address any of the following:

• Non-linear narratives
• Multi-author works
• Reconsidering ownership
• Law in the digital age
• Piracy and plagiarism
• Digital technology
• Transcending conventional mediums
• (Re)use/mediation/mix/vision
• Mash-ups and multi-modalities
• Text-in-progress
• Work that is self-conscious about process
• Restructuring spaces
• Collaborative art
• Questioning “the finished project”
• Re-envisioning embodiment and materiality
• Persona and social networking

Panel proposals should include a coversheet containing panel title, each presenter’s name, the name of a moderator, presentation titles, university affiliation, mailing address, e-mail address, phone number, requests for technology, and anticipated format of presentation (papers, multimodal, interactive, workshop, etc.); the second page should include abstracts of 250-words for each presentation (3 to 4) and a 250-word abstract for the panel as a whole.

Individual proposals should consist of two pages. On the first page, include name, presentation title, university affiliation, mailing address, e-mail address, phone number, and details of any technology you may require, and the anticipated format of presentation (paper, multimodal, interactive, etc.).; the second page should contain a 250-word abstract.
Please do not include identifying information on second page (abstracts).

Individual presentations should not exceed twenty minutes; panel presentations should plan for 80 minutes total (including Q&A time).

Mindful of the financial pressures we all face, there will be no fee to attend or present at this graduate conference.

Send proposals and queries to uccompconf@gmail.com.

Conference website: http://uccompconference.blogspot.com/

LGBTQI Graduate Students and Academia

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:15:31 -0500

The Graduate Student Caucus, an affiliate organization of the MLA, invites proposals for papers to be presented at the 2013 MLA annual meeting (Boston, Jan. 3-6, 2013). Please send abstracts (ca. 250 words) to Ervin Malakaj (emalakaj@wustl.edu) by March 10.

LGBTQI graduate students encounter a variety of barriers – structural, institutional, covert, implicit – as they prepare to enter the profession, which remains an unchanged challenge for many young scholars. We invite scholars from all stages of their academic career to submit proposals for papers that call attention to areas where higher education is falling short of its commitment to equality, diversity, accessibility, visibility, and integration. We welcome papers that would contribute to a larger discussion about how these barriers can be identified and suggestions for how they can be overcome.

[UPDATE] Rated-X: Perversion and Exclusion (Deadline Extension), Feb 15

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:53:25 -0500

Conference Date: Friday, March 30, 2012
Abstracts (250-500 words) Due: February 15, 2012

Submit abstracts via email: brandeis.grad.conference@gmail.com

Conference website:
https://sites.google.com/site/brandeisgradconference/

Plenary Speaker: Lee Edelman, Chair, Department of English, Tufts University

In celebration of the 36th anniversary of the initial publication of Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality, the 6th Annual Brandeis Graduate student conference will explore the ins and outs of various forms of an X-Rating. Being Rated-X implies being marked as other/as outside/as unacceptable as well as being marked as desirable/as visible/as exceptional. Rated-X implies the nakedness of porn and the openness that comes with that. For some there is liberation in this openness. For others there is only exposure. This necessitates the question of whether certain populations are made disposable through exile or instead through visibility; through the erasure or marking of bodies as other. We would like to use this conference to explore some slippage—between these two (and more) types of identification with otherness: the transgression that empowers and enables pleasure versus the polarizing otherness that disenfranchises and dehumanizes. Relevant questions include: Who is doing the marking? Who draws the boundary lines? Does an “X” marking/rating make the bodies of those so-rated untouchable or excessively available for use; or does an “X” rating elevate a body to exceptional status or release it from the strictures of its prescribed social identities? Thus, we will be accepting papers about the exiled body, porn, and anything in between.

Round Table
This round table discussion will consider a study of what is rated-x in academia. What is not worthy of study? What is shameful? What are the margins of acceptability in the academy? We are accepting abstracts for participation in a round table discussion that explores these boundaries and the means by which they are established.

This past year, the question of what is acceptable in the academy was brought to a head when a psychology professor at Northwestern University’s job was threatened after he allowed a live sex act on his stage after class. This is one of many instances that highlights the urgency of a self-reflexive study of censorship.

Participants will submit 5 minute papers on this topic for circulation, addressing any of the following concerns or other related questions: What are the limits of what is an acceptable object of study? What is the expected object of study? What is exposed to observation in academia? What words can or cannot be used? What images can or cannot be shown in professional scholarship or in the classroom? What methodologies are supported or excluded by institutional practices? Please feel free to submit to the Round Table discussion panel in addition to submitting a paper to present.

Abstracts for round table: February 15, 2012
Papers submitted for pre-circulation: March 1, 2012

Creative Arts Panel
We will be accepting submissions for a creative arts panel in order to allow critical discussions to engage with artistic practice. This panel will allow us to further explore disciplinary boundaries and the possibility of interdisciplinary and cross-media discussion. We will accept paintings, poetry, stories, videos/DVDs, and any other media. Please submit a 250 word abstract via email/mail and relevant slides/images on CD or DVD via mail.

Suggested List of Topics
-Citizenship/Exile
-Immigration
-Fantasy/Desire/Pleasure
-Porn/Anti-Porn
-Erotica
-Kinks
-Censorship
-Genres of Smut
-Porn and Race
-Histories of Sexuality
-Sex and Madness/Pathology
-Punishment/Violence/Gore
-Unwritten/Unspeakable
-X as a variable
-Slippage
-Feminist approaches
-Queer approaches
-The problem of academic “sexiness”
-Eco-porn
-Pornographic gaze in science
-GPS tracking of bodies for surveillance, for pleasure, etc.
cfp categories:
african-american
american
bibliography_and_history_of_the_book
cultural_studies_and_historical_approaches
eighteenth_century
film_and_television
gender_studies_and_sexuality
graduate_conferences
humanities_computing_and_the_internet
interdisciplinary
medieval
modernist studies
popular_culture
postcolonial
professional_topics
religion
renaissance
romantic
theatre
theory
twentieth_century_and_beyond
victorian

CFP: First Annual Ray Browne Conference on Popular Culture, March 31-April 1 2012 [DEADLINE EXTENDED]

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:07:54 -0500

We've extended the deadline for submissions for the first annual Ray Browne Conference on Popular Culture (3/31-4/1). The deadline is now February 10, 2012. Please consider submitting!.

The Department of Popular Culture of Bowling Green State University, one of the nation’s preeminent academic departments focusing on popular culture studies, is closing in on some impressive landmarks. 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of the first Master’s Degrees given in Popular Culture and in 2013 the Department of Popular Culture will celebrate 40 years in existence. With these milestones on the horizon, it is appropriate that the Department of Popular Culture has recently founded the Popular Culture Scholars Association, a student organization for undergraduate and graduate students dedicated to examining the prominent subjects, concerns and ideas of 21st century popular culture.

To celebrate the Department of Popular Culture’s anniversaries and the formation of the PCSA, we would like to invite any and all students (undergraduate and graduate), scholars, critics, former members of the POPC program and friends of the department to join us for the first ever Ray Browne Conference on Popular Culture on March 31st through April 1st 2012. The conference will be held on the Bowling Green State University campus. We are pleased to announce that Dr. Gary Hoppenstand will be the keynote speaker. Dr. Hoppenstand received his Ph.D. in American Culture Studies and his M.A. in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University. Currently he is the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Popular Culture and University Distinguished Faculty at Michigan State University.

Dr. Ray Browne founded the Department of Popular Culture to give students an opportunity to intelligently consider the cultural forms of their everyday lives. Nearly 40 years later, our everyday lives are much different. New mediums, genres and industries have been introduced into the complex world of popular culture and innovative perspectives, methods and models have presented new ways in which to investigate popular culture.

In light of these changes, potential topics for paper, panel and roundtable proposals include, but are not limited to:

· How have these additions and shifts altered popular culture, and how do we explore them?
· What are the most pressing issues for popular culture scholars in the 21st century?
· What are the texts, genres, individuals and theoretical approaches that will define popular culture in the years to come?
· Which new media, texts, genres, etc. deserve attention from academics and scholars?
· Are there individual popular culture texts, genres or individuals that embody the important shifts and changes in popular culture as a whole?
· Explorations of specific 21st century popular culture texts, genres, trends and approaches

In short, the Ray Browne Conference on Popular Culture hopes to address this question: what is popular culture in the 21st century and how must we study it?

Again, we welcome proposals and participation from any interested undergraduate and graduate students, as well as any scholars, critics, former members of the POPC program and friends of the department.

The deadline for proposals is Friday, February 10, 2012. Individual paper proposals should be between 300-400 words. Full roundtable and panel theme proposals can be longer, but should include as much prospective information about the topic and number of possible participants as possible. Please email your abstract and a short biography to bgpsca@gmail.com. The subject line should contain the writer’s surname followed by “BCPC12” Abstract. Notifications for decisions will be sent by Friday, February 17, 2012. Please contact the PCSA if you have any questions or concerns atbgpcsa@gmail.com or via our website at http://bgsu.orgsync.com/org/pcsa.

1st Global Conference Making Sense of: Play

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 04:53:28 -0500

1st Global Conference
Making Sense of: Play
Wednesday 11th July 2012 – Friday 13th July 2012
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

“Unlike children in other countries, the Eskimos played no game of war. They played with imaginary rifles and harpoons, but these were never directed against people but against the formidable beasts that haunted the vast wastes of their land.”
(Marie Herbert)

The Call For Papers:
The interdisciplinary project Making Sense Of: Play seeks to examine the various meanings of “play”, elucidate their inter-relationships and trace the origins of the patterns of play and their place in the human condition. Variations in cultural conditions naturally impact on play, its meanings and its forms, as do, often in a different way, economic inequalities both within and between different cultures. Our deliberations will necessarily takes this into account. In many languages, as in English, throughout its etymological history “play” has been closely connected to the world of children and make believe. Academic study of play, too, deals predominantly with various aspects of children’s play and its importance in development. There is, in fact, a lack of balance between the study of play in relation to children and childhood on one hand, and “play” more generally, as outlined above, on the other. For this reason our project explicitly emphasizes the comparatively under-explored aspects of play in linguistic, literary, philosophical, historical, psychological and evolutionary frames of reference.

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
(Plato)

Possible Themes:

- in politics
- in literature
- throughout history
- in philosophy
- as a psychological issue
- its evolutionary significance
- in language
- as humour
- in metaphor
- play of perception
- play and the life-course
- relating to existential crisis (illness, death)
- and love
- and hatred
- and power
- animal play

When:
The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 13th January 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday11th May 2012.

How:
Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words
E-mails should be entitled: PLAY Abstract Submission.
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Who to:

Joint Organising Chairs:
Wendy Turgeon: turgeon@optonline.net
Rob Fisher: play@inter-disciplinary.net

More Details:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of...

[UPDATE] Call for Book Reviews: Bondage and Power, 15 February 2012 (journal issue)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:07:09 -0500

Deadline: February 15, 2012

Book Reviews for Schuylkill graduate journal: Bondage and Power -- Special Issue

Schuylkill graduate journal is seeking submissions from all disciplines for our 10th volume of critical essays and book reviews to be published in Spring of 2012 (online and print). We are seeking book reviews on works addressing the question of bondage and power (broadly defined), 5 pages in length; double spaced; MLA format; no footnotes. Current graduate students should direct their work to Colleen Hammelman and Beth Seltzer at skook@temple.edu by February 15, 2012; no simultaneous submissions please. All reviews will be anonymously reviewed by at least two staff members. Please e-mail submissions with author name and contact info on first page only. In an effort to minimize our environmental impact, copies of submissions not accepted for publication will be recycled.

In his renowned 1992 book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1992), Mike Davis describes the social warfare in Los Angeles that pits the interests of the urban poor and the middle classes. He argues:

The obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s. Yet contemporary urban theory, whether debating the role of electronic technologies in precipitating ‘postmodern space’, or discussing the dispersion of urban functions across poly-centered metropolitan ‘galaxies’, has been strangely silent about the militarization of city life so grimly visible at the street level.

Davis further describes the ways in which “redevelopment massively reproduced spatial apartheid” and how the new architecture and security apparatus in LA has served to bound the poor and homeless to a life as fugitives and always in motion, “pressed between the official policy of containment and the increasing sadism of Downtown streets.” This is but one demonstration of the complexity of bondage and power in society. This is a multifaceted issue in the humanities: the definition and re-definition of these terms and the nature of their interaction has been debated by philosophers, literary theorists, sociologists, novelists, poets, journalists, political theorists, geographers and other scholars of the humanistic sciences across various time periods.

Because we want to provide an original and important angle to the discussion of new works, we will publish reviews by graduate students exclusively. Additionally, the reviews will explicitly address the reviewer's impressions of the importance of the work to future research as well as emerging fields, disciplines, approaches, etc.

To compliment the articles centered on this issue’s special topic of bondage and power, The Schuylkill seeks book reviews of recent scholarship that in some way deal with this topic. Below is a list of suggestions, but the editors are open to other works provided they were published in the past two years.

A few suggestions (though the possibilities are by no means limited to this list):

Gene Sharp’s Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts. (2011)
Isa Blumi’s Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State. (2011)
Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong’s Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen.(2011)
John Hench’s Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II. (2010)
Stephanie Li’s Something Akin to Freedom: The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women. (2010)

We welcome reviews focusing on any of the multi-dimensional aspects of power and bondage, ranging from the bondage of labor to power and the environment to institutional bondage and power, and topics in between. Please feel free to write with questions or proposals.

The Schuylkill is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal founded, edited, and run by graduate students at Temple University in Philadelphia. We are looking to publish the scholarly work of graduate students in the humanities from around the globe. We are especially interested in work that, in presenting a rich and nuanced perspective on the topic of bondage and power, blurs the boundaries of the disciplines (literary theory; philosophy; history; political theory; religious studies; cinema studies; women’s studies; art history; etc.)

[UPDATE] Bondage and Power: 15 February 2012 (journal issue)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:51:09 -0500

We are in bondage to the law in order that we may be free. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero

All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. -- Aldous Huxley

The representation and experience of bondage and power is a complex, multifaceted issue in the humanities: the definition and re-definition of these terms and the nature of their interaction has been debated by philosophers, literary theorists, sociologists, novelists, poets, journalists, political theorists, and other scholars of the humanistic sciences across various time periods. Schuylkill graduate journal is seeking submissions from all disciplines for our 10th volume of critical essays and book reviews to be published in Spring of 2012 (online and in print) which seek to push against, transform, or invigorate traditional and standardized notions of bondage and power, exploring how these variables act upon each other to produce layered and complex combinations. We are seeking papers on the relationship between bondage and power, 10-15 pages in length; double spaced; MLA format; no footnotes. Current graduate students should send their work to Jennifer McKim at skook@temple.edu by 15 February 2012. No simultaneous submissions please.

The Schuylkill invites submissions from across the humanities and social sciences that reflect on the relationship between bondage and power, in the broadest interpretation of these terms. We invite submissions from a diverse range of disciplines, critical perspectives, and time periods.

Topics could include, but are not limited to, the following:

The bondage of labor: wage labor, domestic labor, sweatshops, sex work, debt bondage, social justice

Slavery: narratives of captivity in literature, film, video games and other media; psychological enslavement; Hegelian master-slave dialectics; imperialism and colonial appropriation; fiscal or agricultural enslavement; modern-day slavery; human rights

Visual/auditory representations of power and/or art as resistance to power

Power and the environment: electricity, wind power, steam power, solar energy, nuclear power, sustainability

Bondage to hegemonic structures or systems that foster racism, sexism, ageism, heterosexism, jingoism, ableism, xenophobia, religious persecution, genetic discrimination, linguicism, reverse discrimination, or any other form of intolerance

Power of the digital humanities and/or its limits

Cultural representations of sexual bondage, erotica, and sadomasochism

Institutional bondage and power: incarceration; social mobility; marital and family bonds; religion and power; intellectual bondage; spatial bondage and hyperghettoization; pedagogical power

The relationship between bondage and power on warfare and torture; for example, Abu Graib, its media coverage/ the impact of its iconography

Performances of power

Acts of resistance, subversion, and protest to various forms of bondage and power-based relationships

Power over control/dissemination of information via journalism, blogs, government agencies, television news media, censorship, and propaganda

The Schuylkill is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal founded, edited, and run by graduate students at Temple University in Philadelphia. We are looking to publish the scholarly work of graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences from around the globe. We are especially interested in work that, in presenting a rich and nuanced perspective on the topic of the relationships between bondage and power, blurs the boundaries of the disciplines (literary theory; philosophy; linguistics; sociology; history; political theory; religious studies; cinema studies; women’s studies; classics; art history; geography and urban studies, etc.)

[UPDATE: DEADLINE EXTENDED TO FEB 15] UCLA Southland Graduate Conference: Art and Accident: June 1, 2012

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:04:04 -0500

2012 UCLA Southland Graduate Conference: Art and Accident
June 1, 2012

“Step accidently on your untied shoelace, fall down and you’ll understand a thing or two about the theory of literature.” --Viktor Shklovsky

We might think of the history of modern criticism as a history of denials of the importance of accident in the experience of art, from the central role of “purposiveness” in the Kantian conception of beauty to twentieth-century literary critical debates about authorial intention and organic integrity. The apprehension of accident as such is parried in New Historicist explorations of the complex causal mechanics of “the political unconscious,” and dodged as thoroughly (if much differently) in newer inquiries into the structural roles that affects play in our aesthetic categories. Critics of all stripes know there’s something a little funny when we say “it’s no accident…”—Eve Sedgwick, even, has shown us the joke (we are the kid who’s peed himself on purpose)—but collectively seeing through this gesture does not keep us from making it. It’s difficult for the literary critic to embrace accident, to find a rubric for its appreciation. What’s at stake in learning how? At a critical moment poised for an “aesthetic turn,” that is to say for the reactivation of big questions of art and its systematic study, it is possible to frame anew and ask afresh questions like this; we wager that answering them is a vital task.

This spring, we invite you to untie your shoes and join us in this important work at the annual Southland Graduate Student Conference at UCLA, sponsored by the Friends of English. Possible topics may include, but are in no way limited to, the following:

• changing historical conceptions of the accidental, and how literary art makes its meaning
with, against, or alongside them
• “bad copies” and deviant reprints
• science and the accident of human existence; social history and the accidents of social
forms; accidental institutions and accidents of specialization and discipline
• a “divinity in odd numbers”: theologies of accident; providential interpretation and its discontents
• semiotics and accident; the role of chance in etymology and metaphor
• identity categories: essence and/or accident; accidental sex (and gender)
• the material text as something more than an accident of “the text itself”
• modernism and contingency, modern art and “the arts of contingency”
• realism and “the world of chance”; coincidence and historical causality
• contingency before modernity
• conventional accidents and accidental innovations; genre as literary historical accident
• rhyme and accident; the poetics of mishap; puns and verbal play
• performance and contingency; staged accidents and accidents on stage
• the unpredictability of political crisis and revolution; the logic of mob versus organized protest; terrorism and disaster
• genres of the accidental: essay, picaresque, jazz, found art, flarf poetry, and others; literary evolution and its vicissitudes

This conference is open to all fields and specializations, and we actively encourage speculative and interdisciplinary work. Panels will be organized according to theme. To promote discussion and debate, each panel will feature a brief response from a UCLA graduate student. Keynote speakers: Michael Cohen and Louise Hornby.

Please send 250-word abstracts to art.and.accident@gmail.com by February 15th, 2012. Please paste the abstract the body of the email. Include your name, contact information, department, and institution. Prospective participants will be notified by February 20th. The conference will be held on June 1st, 2012, on the UCLA campus. Send any inquires to the same email address.

“Robin Hood and the Canon," MLA Boston, January 3-6, 2013

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:27:36 -0500

“Robin Hood and the Canon," MLA Boston, January 3-6, 2013

What is the place and status of the Robin Hood texts and tradition in the canon? The Robin Hood literary texts are decidedly varied in terms of genre and form (historical writings, ballads, broadsides, dramas, novellas, and novels, for example), and the tradition stretches from the medieval period to the present. While such canonical writers as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Keats, and Sir Walter Scott, among others, have written about the outlaw, Robin Hood’s presence within the canon is, for many, questionable. While Arthur and the Matter of Britain are fixtures within the canon (and like Robin Hood associated with aspects of popular culture), Robin Hood and the Matter of the Greenwood are in many ways still outside of literary and cultural officialdom – why?

This panel seeks papers that examine the reasons behind the status of the Robin Hood tradition in the canon. Papers that address the interdisciplinary nature of the tradition as it relates to canonicity are encouraged.

Please send 300-word abstracts to Alexander L. Kaufman (akaufman@aum.edu) by March 15, 2012.

2012 International Conference on Future Communication and Computer Technology (ICFCCT 2012)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:30:01 -0500

2012 International Conference on Future Communication and Computer Technology (ICFCCT 2012)
ISTP indexed
2012年未来通信与计算机技术国际学术会议
http://www.icfcct.org/

2012 International Conference on Future Communication and Computer Technology (ICFCCT 2012) will be held in Beijing, China during May 19-20, 2012.
The aim objective of ICFCCT 2012 is to provide a platform for researchers, engineers, academicians as well as industrial professionals from all over the world to present their research results and development activities in Computer, Network and Communication Technology. This conference provides opportunities for the delegates to exchange new ideas and application experiences face to face, to establish business or research relations and to find global partners for future collaboration.
Submitted conference papers will be reviewed by technical committees of the Conference.
ICCNCE 2012 will be published in the conference proceeding, and will be indexed by Thomson ISI Proceedings.
ICFCCT 2012由国际信息与计算机科学研究学会主办,会议将在北京召开。全部论文将送交学术委员会严格审阅后录用，会议论文集将由科学技术出版社出版，将被ISTP检索。
ISBN: 978-988-15121-4-7

Important Date
Paper Submission (Full Paper) Before February 29, 2012
Notification of Acceptance On March 15, 2012
Authors' Registration Before March 25, 2012
Final Paper Submission Before March 25, 2012
ICFCCT 2012 Conference Dates May 19-20, 2012
本次会议投稿中文、英文都可以，中文稿件须有英文题目、英文摘要、英文关键词。参考文献需为英文。中文论文中的图片注释需要中英文对照，中文论文中的表格的标题需要中英文对照。标准注册费用论文版面按照模版排版后不超过5页，超过5页后按照350元/页收取超页费。
SUBMISSION METHODS:
Email: icfcct@163.com ( .pdf and .doc)

Topics:

Information Engineering
Artificial Intelligence 
Bioinformatics 
Software Engineering 
VLSI Design and Fabrication 
Photonic Technologies 
Parallel and Distributed Computing 
Data Mining 
Cryptography 
Algorithms and Data Structures 
Graphs and Combinatorics 
E-commerce and E-learning 
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) 
Networking 
Signal Processing 
Embedded System 
Communication and Wireless Systems 
Multimedia Systems and Applications 
Emerging Technologies 
INetwork Technologies
Wireless & Mobile Networking
Wireless Sensor Networks 
Cognitive Radio Networks 
Ad Hoc, Sensor and Mesh Networking 
Next-Generation Networking and Internet 
Wireless Network Security and Privacy 
Networking and Information Security 
Network Protocol and Congestion Control 
QoS, Reliability & Performance Modeling
Mobility, Location and Handoff Management 
Capacity, Throughput, Outage and Coverage 
Multimedia in Wireless Networks 
Optical Networks and Systems  Computer
Algorithm and Applications 
Artificial Intelligence 
Cloud Computin 
Communication Networks and Protocols 
Database Technologies 
Distributed and Parallel Computing 
Hardware Design and Implementation 
Information Security 
Multimedia and Graphics Technologies 
Operating Systems 
Simulation and Modeling 
Communication
Signal Detection and Parameter Estimation 
Signal, Image and Video Processing 
Speech and Audio Processing 
Wireless Communications 
Communications Transmission 
Network Communication 
Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing 
Ad hoc and Sensor Networks 
Network and System Security 

For more information about this conference, please contact:
Dr. Zheng
E-mail: icfcct@163.com
Tel: +86-10-6625-0765

2011 International Conference on Financial, Management and Education Science (ICFMES 2012)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:27:30 -0500

CALL FOR PAPERS

2011 International Conference on Financial, Management and Education Science (ICFMES 2012)
ISTP indexed
2011年金融、管理与教育科学国际学术会议
http://www.icfmes.org/

2011 International Conference on Financial, Management and Education Science (ICFMES 2012) will be held in Beijing, China during May 19-20, 2012.
The aim objective of ICCNCE 2012 is to provide a platform for researchers, engineers, academicians as well as industrial professionals from all over the world to present their research results and development activities in Computer, Network and Communication Technology. This conference provides opportunities for the delegates to exchange new ideas and application experiences face to face, to establish business or research relations and to find global partners for future collaboration.
Submitted conference papers will be reviewed by technical committees of the Conference.
ICFMES 2012 will be published in the conference proceeding, and will be indexed by Thomson ISI Proceedings.
ICFMES 2012由国际信息与计算机科学研究学会主办,会议将在北京召开。全部论文将送交学术委员会严格审阅后录用，会议论文集将由科学技术出版社出版，将被ISTP检索。
ISBN: 978-988-15121-5-4

Topics:
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Accounting
Business
Financial Economics
Law and Economics
Information Management
Information Systems and Technology
Financial and Banking
e-Business Engineering and Management
Theory and Practice of Modern Management
Modern Quality Management
Knowledge Management
Education Innovation
Educational Theory
Teaching practice
Education Policy
Educational Psychology
Educational reform
Curriculum Reform
Ideological and Political Education
Educational party construction
Vocational Education
Adult Education
Audio-visual education
School Management
Education Economy
Social Development
Technology Development Knowledge innovation project
School and society
Personnel training
Sports Education

For more information about this conference, please contact:
Dr. Zheng
E-mail: icfmes@163.com
Tel: +86-10-6625-0765

4th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Students' Association Conference (Abstracts due 2/4/2012)

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:51:28 -0500

Fourth Annual Student Conference
February 25, 2012
California State University, Long Beach
Long Beach, California

The Medieval and Renaissance Students' Association at CSULB is seeking proposals for individual papers and group panels from graduate and undergraduate students in all disciplines for its Fourth Annual Student Conference. Proposals should be sent as presentation abstracts of 250 words or less. Presentations should be approximately 15-20 minutes in length, allowing an additional 5-10 minutes for discussion and questions.

MaRSA welcomes proposals from all disciplines and levels of study, but submissions should be limited to topics ranging from the Medieval through Early Modern periods. Modern topics relevant to this period, such as anachronism or medievalism, as well as proposals pertaining to regions outside of Europe, are also welcome.

Accepted participants will also be given the opportunity to work with MaRSA in publishing their work in a collection of essays on the conference's proceedings.

Proposals must include:
-The presenter of panel organizer's name and contact information
-A presentation title
-A 250-word abstract

The deadline for abstracts is February 4, 2012. A list of accepted participants will be announced by February 6.
Proposals should be submitted in the body of an e-mail to: csulbmarsa@gmail.com
Please use the following subject heading when submitting abstracts: MARSA 2012
Inquiries may be directed to the MaRSA staff at csulbmarsa@gmail.com, or to one of our officers.

www.sites.google.com/site/csulbmarsa/

Agora: TAMUC Graduate Student Conference

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:25:49 -0500

English Graduates for Academic Development (EGAD)

Presents:

Agora: TAMUC Graduate Student Conference

April 12-13, 2012
Texas A&M University-Commerce
(Submission deadline extended until Feb. 29th)

Keynote Speakers
Roberta Seelinger Trites, Jay Telotte, Sara Cushing Weigle

Call for Conference Papers:
The Agora as constructed by the early Greeks was a public assembly space—the town square where merchants and philosophers met to exchange goods and ideas. Today, the Agora has evolved from the city square and market place as the convergence of many public interests to a virtual space in which different cognitive, epistemological, communicative stances meet together and compare, contrast, and argue on processes of knowledge and science. It is in that same spirit that the English Graduates for Academic Development (EGAD) of Texas A&M University-Commerce provides the Agora as a market place of ideas. Submissions are open to both graduate and undergraduate students.

For the first time, in order to meet specific interests of research and reflection, the EGAD conference will be organized in four sections that correspond to the four “souls” of our graduate program at both the master’s and doctoral levels:

Literature
Film studies
Branches of Linguistics
Rhetoric and Composition Studies

See below for specific calls for each section listed above.

Submission Guidelines
Abstracts should be submitted to EGAD.TAMUC@gmail.com no later than February 29, 2012.

Within the body of the email please include:
name
affiliation
email address
title of paper
a brief biographical statement
preferred section: film studies, literature, linguistics, rhetoric/composition
Please attach the abstract submission as either a .doc or .rtf file
Abstracts should be between 250-500 words
If you are making a creative writing submission, please indicate this within the abstract describing the work

Please list any audio and visual equipment necessary for your presentation. Please note that laptops will not be provided.

Conference Fee
$35 early registration (ends February 29, 2012)
$50 late registration (after February 29, 2012)
$12 Friday night awards banquet

Checks can be made payable to: EGAD
Department of Literature and Languages
P. O. Box 3011
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Commerce, TX 75429-3011

Call details for each section:

Literature
Panels are now being formed in the Literature area of the Agora Conference at Texas A&M-Commerce. Scholars, researchers, professionals, teachers, graduate students and others interested in this area are encouraged to submit an abstract. Given that our conference theme, Agora, focuses on an area where a plethora of people and ideas intersect, proposals on fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or cross-genre topics are invited.
Our keynote speaker is Roberta Seelinger Trites, children’s literature scholar and author of Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature and Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels.
However, we welcome submissions from a diverse range of disciplines, critical perspectives, and time periods, as well. To that end, we are interested in continuing to promote work in:
Children’s Literature
American Literature
British Literature
Race, Gender, Class and/or Ability Studies
Queer Studies
Cultural History
Graphic Narratives
Science Fiction

We also seek to broaden the scope of our conversations by encouraging panels that draw from areas frequently under-represented at graduate conferences such as (but certainly not limited to):

Literature in Translation
World Literature
National and Migrant Identities in Literature
Literary Radicalism
Environmentalism(s) in Literature
Food and Beverage Cultures
Literature of Fan Culture
Politics in/of Literature
Creative Pieces

Film Studies
The film studies section is accepting paper and panel proposals that explore film as representative of social and/or historical contexts, especially relating to the various ways in which film can serve as a marketplace of ideas in our culture. Possible topics of relevance include (but are not limited to):

What do film adaptations say about our ideas and values at a given period of time?
In what ways do cult films (and the cults surrounding them) function as an exchange of ideas?
How has film as a narrative medium, as well as a representation of culture, served to influence history?
How has economy altered the way that movies are made as well as marketed?
What sort of cultural implications do these alterations have?
How does film censorship alter exchanges of ideas?

We also welcome any proposals for other topics of interest from all areas of film study.
Jay Telotte is our keynote speaker. He is the Interim Chair, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Literature, Communication and Culture. He is also a co-editor of the film journal, Post Script, in addition to having numerous publications on film, television and literary studies.

Branches of Linguistics
We invite papers from any area of theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics, or their applications. Besides the traditional core areas (phonetics, phonology,morphology, syntax, semantics, first and second language acquisition), fields of interest include, but are not limited to the following:
lexicography
pragmatics
psycholinguistics
sociolinguistics
historical linguistics
stylistics
corpus linguistics
discourse analysis
textual analysis
rhetoric
computational linguistics

Moreover, interdisciplinary approaches are more than welcome as long as linguistics and its branches play a significant role in the investigation. Among the many areas that can be addressed:
communication and mass communication
education
cognition
logic
literature
literacy
composition
ethnology
anthropology
creative writing
marketing
advertising

Sara Cushing Weigle is our keynote speaker. She is an associate professor in the department of Applied Linguistics and ESL at Georgia State University.

Rhetoric and Composition
The Rhetoric and Composition section is accepting paper and panel proposals that explore the intersections between the metaphor of the marketplace, writing, writing centers, and pedagogy. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
Academic labor and the institution
The political economy of writing and writing centers
Exchange(s) within the classroom
Technical writers within the job market
The dual enrollment classroom as a site of transition
We also welcome any proposals for other topics of interest from all areas, especially interdisciplinary studies, WAC/WID theory, and ESL/TESOL.

2nd Global Conference: Images of Whiteness

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:37:07 -0500

2nd Global Conference
Images of Whiteness

Saturday 7th July 2012 – Monday 9th July 2012
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:
Since the publication of Richard Dyer’s seminal study 'White' in 1997, academics have increasingly turned critical attention to the subject of racial whiteness. Publications include historical accounts detailing the emergence of whiteness as a racial category, cultural studies exploring the representation and construction of white identities in popular culture, film and television scholars examining narratives about white people, reflecting white themes, white obsessions, and white anxieties. Consistent with the shift in critical studies from minority identity formations to consider ‘central’ identities – masculinity, heterosexuality – the study of whiteness is increasingly understood as central to understanding the operation of ‘race’ as a form of social categorisation. Inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives are sought from those engaged in any field relevant to the study of whiteness including media and film studies, performance and creative writing, cultural theory, sociology, psychology and medical approaches including cosmetic surgery, and other cognate areas

Inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives are sought from those engaged in any field relevant to the study of whiteness including media and film studies, performance and creative writing, cultural theory, sociology, psychology and medical.

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

* Appropriation of racial ‘otherness’ within white culture
* Whiteness and Anti-Whiteness, post arpatheid otherness
* Images of whiteness in serial television
* Nationally-specific formations of white identity
* Whiteness and multiculturalism
* Constructions of whiteness in painting, photography and the visual arts
* Performances of/performing ‘whiteness’
* Writing whiteness in fiction/non-fiction
* The politics and ethics of White Studies
* Racial whiteness, fashion and cosmetics industries
* Whiteness and absence, emptiness and death
* Teaching whiteness
* Intersections between whiteness, gender and sexuality
* Conceptions of whiteness in non-white cultures
* Music and music videos and whiteness

Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 17th February 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 11th May 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: Whiteness2 Abstract Submission.

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

Organising Chairs
Ewan Kirkland
University of Brighton
Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies
United Kingdom
Email: ekirklanduk@yahoo.co.uk

Colette Balmain
Independent Scholar
United Kingdom
E-mail: cb@inter-disciplinary.net

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
E-mail: white2@inter-disciplinary.net

For further details of the project, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ethos/whiteness/

For further details of the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ethos/whiteness/call-f...

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Survival, Friday, October 26, 2012

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:31:09 -0500

Call for Papers: MCEA Conference, Friday, October 26, 2012
Theme: Survival
Luncheon Speaker: Patricia Clark, Poet-in-Residence at GVSU

Location: Eberhard Center of Grand Valley State University
301 W. Fulton St., Grand Rapids MI 49504

Survival is a primary concern for many of us, not just economically or physically but in our relationships, at our work places, and in our political causes. Literature is full of desperate struggles for survival, sometimes with successful results, sometimes not. To survive, our students strive to pass classes, meet deadlines, fund their education, and make good career choices. As teachers, we worry about the elimination of programs, our health benefits, and even our jobs. What efforts to survive do we/others recognize and how are these efforts seen in all areas of English studies?

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

The Michigan College English Association invites proposals for individual papers and for complete or open panels for our Fall 2012 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 paper must be submitted to Joyce Meier by October 1, 2012.

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; creative writing; critical pedagogy; critical studies in the teaching of English; cultural studies; film studies; developmental education; English as a second language; linguistics; literary studies; multicultural literature; on-line English courses and the virtual university; popular culture; race, class, and gender studies; progressive education; reading and writing across the curriculum; student demographics; student/instructor accountability and assessment; student placement; study skills; technical writing.
Proposals are due by Friday, October 5, 2012. Early submissions are welcome. Submit proposals to Joyce Meier, Program Chair, via email at meierjo@msu.edu Please specify your needs for audio-visual equipment and the best time of day for your presentation.

"FOUR-FOOTED ACTORS: LIVE ANIMALS ON THE STAGE” University of Valencia (Spain) Dec. 12-14, 2012

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:27:08 -0500

Writing in 1899, Frederick Dolman argued in an article titled “Four-Footed Actors: About Some Well-Known Animals that Appear in the London and Provincial Stage” that the “growth of variety theatres and the decay of comic songs” had developed in “several kinds of diversion, not the least of which is furnished by the art of the animal-trainer” (The English Illustrated Magazine, Sep. 1899, 192, p. 521). Dolman was describing the large-scale entertainments starring animals that had taken over traditional spectator recreations for the last century in a manner not unlike the success of music-halls and professional sport. In this sense, Lord George Sanger’s zoological pantomimes best reflected the spirit of the new age and the advent of the commercialisation of leisure. As recalled by himself, the cast in the production of Gulliver’s Travels included “three hundred girls, two hundred men, two hundred children, thirteen elephants, nine camels, and fifty-two horses, in addition to ostriches, emus, pelicans, deer of all kinds, kangaroos, Indian buffaloes, Brahmin bulls, and (…) two living lions led by the collar and chain into the centre of the group”.
Indeed, popular amusements have featured animals since antiquity, as shown by wild animal fights (venationes and bestiarii) and ritual slaughters (hecatombs) in Greek and Roman amphitheatres. Similarly, trained animal performances peppered medieval Europe. A newspaper article published in The Saturday Magazine in 1839 described a 12th-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript portraying a joculator with his pipe and tabor, accompanied by a dancing bear and dogs and even a cock on stilts. The author sadly deplored the spread of such activities amongst civilized societies and regretted the audience’s infatuation with them. “What is the feeling that prompts men to run after exhibitions of this kind? It is an admiration of the skill displayed by the animal, or that displayed by the owner in teaching the animal, or merely a love for the grotesque and marvellous let it be shown in what way it may?” (The Saturday Magazine, April 27, 1839). Dogs, horses, pigs, goats, cocks, bears, monkeys and “quadrupeds of all sorts and sizes” frequently performed in Europe. Memorable shows include Astley’s equestrian drama or the antics of Nicolet’s monkey Turco in Paris, who was capable of imitating the Comédie-Française actor Molé. Further extravagances like tightrope dancing canaries, horse-riding oxen, card-playing deer, soldier-marching little birds, pigs solving mathematical puzzles, boxing kangaroos, and dogs setting-off cannons, amongst many other animaux savants shows, delighted every kind of audience. As early as 1572, Thomas Cartwright mockingly declared in his admonition to Parliament against the use of the Common Prayer that “if there be a bull or a bear to be baited in the afternoon, or a jackanapes to ride on horseback, the minister hurries the service over in a shameful manner, in order to be present at the show” (The Saturday Magazine, April 27, 1839).
The industrialisation of public spectacle turned classic animal performances into monumental, exotic shows, ranging from grand opera played on horseback to the vivid representation of a city siege with dogs. Not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did the drama witness such an eclosion of hybrid theatrical forms in which live animals acquired an essential part in the syntactic, thematic and dynamic development of the play.

The aim of this conference is to explore the role of live animals on the stage, from the early modern era to the present time. Papers dealing with visual or textual representations of performing animals, typologies of animals in the theatre, the hybridisation of the drama with the circus, the zoo and the cinema, as well as the semiotic transfer of animal roles from the text to the stage are particularly welcome. Corollary topics may also include, but are not limited to:

-Animals and the birth of the mass-entertainment industry
-Animals and melodrama
-Animals and pantomime
-Educability and animal training for the stage
-Sentience and animals as moral beings
-Anthropocentrism over non-human others
-Animal cruelty and speciesism on the stage
-Acting animals and spirituality
-Animal impersonators
-Hygiene and public safety measures and regulations in playhouses
-Stage mimicry
-Animal welfare and national identity
-Animal acting and stage scenery
-Performing animals and music
-Animals on the stage and Darwinism
-Domestic vs wild animals on the stage
-Animals on the stage and the animal rights movement (19th-20th centuries)
-Animal and gender roles on the stage

Contributions:

Contributions are sought from researchers at any stage of their careers. Abstracts (300 words) in English or Spanish for 25-minute papers should be sent along with a short biographical note by 1 June 2012 to Ignacio.Ramos@uv.es
Acceptance will be notified no later than July 2012.

Conference fees and registration:

Speakers: 60 euros
Attendees: 20 euros

Organising committee:

Dr. Ignacio Ramos Gay
Dr. Miguel Teruel
Dr. Juan-Vicente Martínez Luciano
Prof. Claude Benoit

Department of French & Italian Philology
Department of English & German Philology

"The Fictions of Finance," Special issue of Radical History Review, Abstracts due March 15, 2012

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:39:32 -0500

Across the humanities and social sciences, a new conversation has begun about the enigmas of capital, and of finance capital, in particular. This special issue of the Radical History Review on “The Fictions of Finance” aims to intervene in that conversation and to help to shape it. From geography, history, and literary studies to anthropology, sociology, and labor studies, there has been an efflorescence of work on finance and commercial capital, flourishing amid the current capital crisis and chronic “recession.” As a historical primer on the planetary intersections of the rhetorical and the operational dimensions of “The Fictions of Finance,” this issue is designed to knit together the disparate strands of these renewed conversations. In naming that theme, we mean to recover the old notion that finance capital is itself a kind of fabrication, an illusion—the realm of Marx’s “fictitious capital.” History provides a long record of cultural figurations of this fictionality, of the fraudulent productivity and magical profit of credit and speculation—from the “wind wheat” of Illinois to the “devil” of Colombia. But new modes of thought have continually helped to marginalize those responses and to naturalize the mechanisms of finance capital. In other words, to paraphrase cultural historian Ann Fabian, economic innovation and epistemological innovation have gone hand in hand.

With “The Fictions of Finance,” then, we mean to decipher a vast array of moral panics, conceptual revolutions, legal constructions, and discursive forms implicated and imbricated within the world histories of capital. This theme may point in many directions: genealogies of economic thought; the performativity of economic theory; finance capital’s institutional architectures, such as corporations and state bureaucracies; territorial sovereignties, geographical imaginaries or spatial materialities secured by finance capital; techniques of racial capitalism; and modes of imperialism and accumulation. We want this theme to mark out the space for an interdisciplinary conversation, rather than a strictly historical one, about the political economy of finance capitalism. We seek a cultural history, writ large, writ global, of the forms, concepts, subjects, and networks that finance capital elaborates. In other words, we’d like to emphasize critiques of capitalism and to foreground its logic, and, practically speaking, to emphasize provocative juxtapositions of topics.

Some possible topics this issue might explore include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Slave insurance, slave mortgages, and the corporealization of finance capital
• Speculation and risk as imperatives of capitalist citizenship
• “Time is money,” and other tropes of the transactionalism of everyday life
• Microfinance, credit-baiting, and primitive accumulation in the Global South
• Pin money and the domestication of finance
• FIRE economies and the rise of global cities
• “Ball pork”: the circulation of finance capital through built and natural environments
• Territorial and national sovereignties imagined by finance capital
• Shysters, Welfare Queens and other discourses of parasitism
• Radical critiques of finance capital, among theorists and activists around the world
• The grammar of finance, e.g., the categories of credit and debt (whether personal or national)
• The instruments of finance, e.g., double-entry bookkeeping and collateralized debt obligations
• Money as a narrative strategy, from the realist novel to conceptual art
• The personification of the market that speaks, sleeps, and stumbles
• Global cycles of finance capital and the temporality of history
• Finance capital and the scapes of modernity: HSBC as “The World’s Local Bank”
• The boundary between clean and dirty money
• The emergence of the concept of finance capital
• Homo Economicus: the productions of affect, desire, and subjectivity
• The legal “personhood” of business corporations

The RHR seeks scholarly, monographic research articles, but we also encourage such non-traditional contributions as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, and teaching notes and annotated course syllabi for our Teaching Radical History section.

Procedures for submission of articles: At this time we are requesting abstracts that are no longer than 400 words; these are due by March 15, 2012 and should be submitted electronically as an attachment to contactrhr@gmail.com with “Issue 118 submission” in the subject line. By April 15, 2012, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article to undergo the peer review process. The due date for completed drafts of articles is October 1, 2012. An invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee publication.

Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to send high-resolution image files (jpg or tif files at a minimum of 300 dpi), and secure written permission to reprint all images. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 118 of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Winter 2014.

For preliminary e-mail inquiries, please include “Issue 118” in the subject line.

Abstract Deadline: March 15, 2012

Radical History Review 
Tamiment Library, 10th Floor 
New York University 
70 Washington Square South 
New York, NY 10012 
Email: contactrhr@gmail.com
Visit the website at http://chnm.gmu.edu/rhr/rhr.htm

[UPDATE] RMMLA Literature and Religion session (DEADLINE 3/1/12)

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:36:31 -0500

The Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association invites the submission of proposals for individual papers to its Literature and Religion session. Papers may engage a wide range of religious and literary traditions, historical periods, and theoretical approaches. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the intersection between literature, religion, and the following issues:

- Gender/sexuality/race
- Nation
- The family
- Modernity
- Secularization
- Fundamentalism
- Revolution
- Representations of the messianic or the apocalyptic

Presentations should be 15 to 20 minutes long (approximately 8 doubled-spaced pages).

The deadline for paper proposals is MARCH 1, 2012.

The 2012 RMMLA Convention will be held from October 11-13 in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. For more information, please visit
http://rmmla.wsu.edu/conferences/default.asp

Please submit a proposal of approximately 350 words and an abstract of approximately 50 words to Trisha Tucker at ttucker@usc.edu (include RMMLA 2012 in the subject line). Please submit your proposal and abstract together as a .doc or .pdf attachment.

Be sure to include your name, phone number, mailing address, and
institutional affiliation.

All applicants will be contacted about the status of their applications by MARCH 15, 2012.

Non-RMMLA members may propose a paper but membership in RMMLA is required of all presenters by April 1, 2012.

[UPDATE--KEYNOTE: THIERRY BARDINI] WASTE: An Interdisciplinary Conference (March 30-31, 2012))

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:52:08 -0500

WASTE: An Interdisciplinary Conference

March 30-31, 2012

Keynote Address: Thierry Bardini (Universite de Montreal), author of Junkware and Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing

There are as many ways to conceptualize waste as there are ways in which waste permeates our world. It is ubiquitous; it figures into existence at every level. The history of waste is a history of equivocation, affirmation, disavowal, subsistence, persistence, inconvenience, differentiation, destruction, and decay. From the pragmatics of city sanitation to the logistics of disaster relief, from the remainders of mathematical equations to the emotive excesses of sentimental novels, the problem of “what remains” is central to the practice of academic inquiry.

For our 10th Annual Conference, we invite graduate students in any discipline to consider the challenges and productive yields of waste. Presentations are expected to be approximately 15 to 20 minutes. For research or critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to egsoalbany@gmail.com by February 15th.

We also invite graduate student artists to submit proposals. The conference will offer an opportunity for creative writers, visual artists, photographers, sound artists, digital artists, and any students actively engaged in other creative media to present and discuss how their work deals with waste. In what ways is waste encountered in the artistic process? How do you materially, thematically, or conceptually address waste? Presentations are expected to be approximately 15 to 20 minutes. Please email a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files) as well as a 250 word description of your proposed presentation to egsoalbany@gmail.com by February 15th. Video projectors, computers, speakers, and other technologies can be arranged to supplement presentations.

Possible avenues for exploration may include:

-ruins and fragments, relics, monuments, artifacts 
-ecology, environmentalism, conservation, recycling, reusing, eco-terrorism
 -surplus value, wasted labor; toxic assets, ponzi schemes, hostile takeovers
 -mathematical remainders, repeating series, infinite decimals, fractals
 -the nonhuman and things; nature and matter 
-bio-waste: feces, vomit, phlegm, bile, pus, dismemberment; evolution and vestigiality
 -theological waste and apocalypses 
-natural catastrophes, plagues, and “acts of God” 
-historical and political devastation: industrialization, war, terrorism, genocide, post-colonialism 
-bad tastes: camp, kitsch, porn, pop, sentimentality, pulps, and other aesthetics of “trash”
 -editing and revision: new editions, unfinished works, and translations; cast-offs of canon formation and literary leftovers
 -aural matter: noise, static, feedback -figures of waste (grave-diggers, collectors, corpses, cadavers, and the undead); ruined women, prodigal sons, wayward youths and other literary archetypes
 -collage, bricolage, detournement, found art, sampling, palimpsest, and other artistic recyclings 
-differentiating waste: garbage, trash, refuse, debris, rubbish, jetsam and flotsam, leftovers 
-waste sites: heaps, landfills, dumps, attics/basements, catacombs, battlefields, abandoned areas, fallout zones

http://egsoalbany.weebly.com/conference.html

“Robin Hood and the Canon,” MLA Boston, January 3-6, 2013. Abstracts Due March 15, 2012

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:11:48 -0500

“Robin Hood and the Canon”

What is the place and status of the Robin Hood texts and tradition in the canon? The Robin Hood literary texts are decidedly varied in terms of genre (historical writings, ballads, broadsides, dramas, novellas, and novels), and the tradition stretches from the medieval period to the present. While such canonical writers as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Keats, and Sir Walter Scott, among others, have written about the outlaw, Robin Hood’s presence within the canon is, for many, questionable. While Arthur and the Matter of Britain are fixtures within the canon (and like Robin Hood associated with aspects of popular culture), Robin Hood and the Matter of the Greenwood are in many ways still outside of literary and cultural officialdom – why?

Please send 300-word abstracts to Alexander L. Kaufman (akaufman@aum.edu) by March 15, 2012.

Achronicity/Anachronism (1000-1700)

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:38:19 -0500

Achronicity/Anachronism (1000-1700)

An Interdisciplinary Conference to take place on February 21-23, 2013, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sponsored by the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

Anachronism is a term that seems to presuppose a fixed and dominant temporal order, a chronological sequence within which each element or event occupies its own proper coordinates within the orderly flow of time. A Greek term, the “anachronistic” has become inseparable from its close Latin counterpart, the “preposterous”—literally, the before-behind. Anachronism has often been seen as a fault; a fault either testifying to a given culture’s lack of historical consciousness and historicist sensibilities, e.g. the Middle Ages’s supposed inability to think in historicist terms, or else as a type of scholarly error. Anachronism is an accusation, an error, a transgression, a stigma. The charge of anachronism seeks to reveal a critical failure to understand the pastness of the past. This perceived failure in turn exposes to ridicule scholars, artists, and entire cultures that are guilty of this charge.

Yet arguably, even the most academically disciplined ways of thinking historically cannot proceed without disavowed acts of anachronism. As scholars of the “medieval” and “early modern” eras, we know that the very names attached to our historical fields of specialty are the product of creative anachronism. The Middle Ages could not become its middling self until the moment of its death, the advent of the Renaissance. What is more anachronistic than the idea of “The Renaissance,” imagined as a phoenix-like return to antiquity that completely circumvents history—the “Middle Ages” itself?

Furthermore, medieval and early modern texts bear evidence of a multiplicity of temporalities that allow for various and varied experiences of time itself. This heterogeneous premodern notion of time includes Biblical time, historical time, seasonal time, and times for worship. It recognizes diverse practices of typological or allegorical reading that coexist with literal reading, and it suggests a complex understanding of notions such as originality, authenticity, and authority. In the context of this conference, achronicity refers to this productive multiplicity of temporalities.

This conference will provide a select group of scholars from a broad spectrum of disciplinary fields in the humanities an opportunity to investigate together the creative potential of anachronism and/or achronicity. It addresses the ways in which temporality was conceptualized, experienced, strategically exploited, aesthetically constructed and ideologically challenged in the medieval and early modern periods. Some of the questions driving this conference are: How can anachronism/achronicity be strategically deployed to highlight problematic aspects of temporality? How can anachronism/achronicity be used to signify competing temporal frames? How does anachronism/achronicity contribute to expressing complex schemes of history, e.g. by linking the eschatological to everyday experience? How does anachronism/achronicity point to the materiality of the historical object itself?

Please submit 500-word abstracts to Prof. Christoph Brachmann (AnachronicityUNC@gmail.com) by April 30, 2012.

[UPDATE--DEADLINE EXTENDED] Waste: An Interdisciplinary Conference (March 30-31, 2012)

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:11:30 -0500

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO FEBRUARY 15TH

WASTE

March 30-31, 2012

We also invite graduate student artists to submit proposals. The conference will offer an opportunity for creative writers, visual artists, photographers, sound artists, digital artists, and any students actively engaged in other creative media to present and discuss how their work deals with waste. In what ways is waste encountered in the artistic process? How do you materially, thematically, or conceptually address waste? Presentations are expected to be approximately 15 to 20 minutes. Please email a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files) as well as a 250 word description of your proposed presentation to egsoalbany@gmail.com by February *15*. Video projectors, computers, speakers, and other technologies can be arranged to supplement presentations.

Possible avenues for exploration may include:

-ruins and fragments, relics, monuments, artifacts 
-ecology, environmentalism, conservation, recycling, reusing, eco-terrorism
 -surplus value, wasted labor; toxic assets, ponzi schemes, hostile takeovers 
-mathematical remainders, repeating series, infinite decimals, fractals 
-the nonhuman and things; nature and matter -bio-waste: feces, vomit, phlegm, bile, pus, dismemberment; evolution and vestigiality
 -theological waste and apocalypses -natural catastrophes, plagues, and “acts of God”
 -historical and political devastation: industrialization, war, terrorism, genocide, post-colonialism
 -bad tastes: camp, kitsch, porn, pop, sentimentality, pulps, and other aesthetics of “trash” 
-editing and revision: new editions, unfinished works, and translations; cast-offs of canon formation and literary leftovers 
-aural matter: noise, static, feedback 
-figures of waste (grave-diggers, collectors, corpses, cadavers, and the undead); ruined women, prodigal sons, wayward youths and other literary archetypes
 -collage, bricolage, detournement, found art, sampling, palimpsest, and other artistic recyclings
 -differentiating waste: garbage, trash, refuse, debris, rubbish, jetsam and flotsam, leftovers
 -waste sites: heaps, landfills, dumps, attics/basements, catacombs, battlefields, abandoned areas, fallout zones

California State University Long Beach 4th Annual Medieval & Renaissance Students Association Conference CFP

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:52:46 -0500

California State University, Long Beach Medieval and Renaissance
Students Association & Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Fourth Annual Student Conference Call for Papers

February 25, 2012
California State University, Long Beach
Long Beach, California

Accepted participants will also be given the opportunity to work with MaRSA in publishing their work in a collection of essays on the conference's proceedings.

Proposals should include:
The presenter or panel organizer's name and contact information
A presentation title
A 250-word abstract

The deadline for abstracts is February 4, 2012;
A list of accepted participants will be announced by February 6th.
Proposals should be submitted in the body of an e-mail to: csulbmarsa@gmail.com
Please use the following subject heading when submitting abstracts:
MARSA 2012
Inquiries may be directed to the MaRSA staff at csulbmarsa@gmail.com.

To register, or for information, go to www.sites.google.com/site/csulbmarsa/
.

The Medieval and Renaissance Students' Association at California State University, Long Beach, founded in 2007, is the student association of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and is dedicated to fostering an arena of collegial dialogue and support for the pre- and post-baccalaureate community.

CFP: "The Body Electric" Graduate conference, University of Maryland, College Park, March 3rd, 2012

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:34:40 -0500

The Graduate English Organization of the University of Maryland’s Department of English invites graduate students to submit abstracts for our fifth annual interdisciplinary graduate conference. The theme of this year’s conference is “The Body Electric.”

When Walt Whitman sang about the “body electric” he was thinking about a fantasy of connectivity, a body at once charged and charging. Using the “body electric” as a focal point, this conference hopes to highlight a broad spectrum of work from a variety of fields, literary and otherwise. Abstracts that focus on studies of the body, connectivity, persuasion, electricity, philosophy/philosophy of mind, morality, politics/the body politic, and affect theory are welcome and encouraged. Similarly, “The Body Electric” may tap into discourses of historical and emerging technologies—allowing us to think of writers like Whitman, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and Virginia Woolf as possessing a clear stake in the popular science of their respective ages. “The Body Electric” creates connectivity and allows for an unbounded self—just as Clarissa Dalloway “felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’…but everywhere.”

In considering the way language and literature tenuously work to bridge the gaps they often create, the category of an electric body becomes useful in thinking of affect, rhetoric, social change, mediation, enlightenment, subjectivity, and technology. For instance, thinking of social movements in the journalistic commonplace of “electric” allows us to examine the currents of communication that make them possible. Rhetorically, these currents of communication may consider the bodies of work we create and shape; in doing so, one might explore the discourse of writing as performance that provides a space to help (our students) develop a vital connection to the delivery of texts; the “body electric” becomes a central consideration as we perform written, spoken, and multimodal works. Likewise, thinking about the affective scene as implicitly electric allows us to articulate a genealogy of the emotions.

In its broadest sense, “The Body Electric” lends itself to a number of opportunities for interrogation. How do these connections happen? Does considering the body as electric allow for reformulations of the relationship between the body and the mind? between populace and politician? between society and morality? Do burgeoning social media technologies like Twitter and Facebook extend or inhibit Whitman’s dream of expansive connectivity?

The conference committee invites proposals for fifteen-minute papers from a broad range of disciplines and theoretical backgrounds. Presentations of creative work are also welcome. Panel submissions (3-4 participants) are highly encouraged. Please limit individual abstracts to 300 words and panel abstracts to 500 words. Full papers may accompany abstracts. Please include three keywords at the end of the abstract to assist panel formation.

The deadline for submissions is January 30th, 2011. Please send all proposals to conference.geo@gmail.com.

Captivity Writing Unbound

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:39:19 -0500

Call for Papers: "Captivity Writing Unbound"
University of South Alabama (Mobile/Fairhope, AL)
October 11-13, 2012

Proposals for panels and papers are invited for a conference entitled "Captivity Writing Unbound," to be hosted by the University of South Alabama’s Department of English and held at its Baldwin County campus, which is set in the heart of the quaint artist community of Fairhope, overlooking scenic Mobile Bay. As conference organizers, we envision a relatively concentrated event in which select scholars working in various disciplines and historical periods will present new ideas about the general area of writing and captivity. We are particularly interested in papers that explore and extend the traditional boundaries of the study of captivity writing, whether these are conceived generically, geographically, historically, or in disciplinary terms.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Literary and Filmic Representations of Captivity (Prometheus Bound, Exodus, The Odyssey, etc.)

• Captivity and Nationality

• Defining and/or Theorizing Captivity

• Animals and Captivity

• Fashion and Captivity (the corset, footbinding, etc.)

• Nature and Captivity

• Captivity and the Unearthly (alien abduction, etc.)

• The Erotics of Captivity

• Psychology and Captivity (phobias, eating disorders, addiction, body identity disorder)

• Captivity and Theory (Jacques Lacan's Mirror Stage, Georges Poulet's phenomenology of reading, etc.)

• Paradoxes of Captivity (illusory notions of escape and freedom, willing captives, S & M practices)

• Antidotes to Captivity (Existentialism, death, meditation, transcendentalism)

• Captivity as Metaphor

• Gender, Race, and Class as Forms of Captivity

• Genre as Captivity

• Pedagogy and Captivity

• The Captive Audience

• Narrative as Captivity

• History as Captivity

• Captivity and the Body (especially the obese, the diagnosed and/or medicated body)

• Captivity and the Carceral

• Captivity and Technology

• Transhistorical Captivities

• Captivity Narrative’s Others (narratives of assimilation, captor narratives)

As much as we trust that this conference will generate exciting new scholarship, we also hope to foster a substantial exchange of ideas and perspectives among participants not only during scheduled sessions but also between and after. To this end, panels will meet sequentially rather than concurrently so that all participants will be able to attend all panels, and we strongly encourage participants to stay for the duration of the conference. We believe that much good work will come from the conference, and we intend to assemble a collection of essays in the months following the conference in order to share that good work with the widest possible audience. Kicking off the conference will be a keynote address by Michelle Burnham, Early American scholar and author of Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861. As early as 1997, Burnham was already thinking beyond the usual confines of the captivity narrative, and thus we are particularly happy to have her on hand as we talk, think, and write about new ways in which to conceive the captivity narrative.

Please submit proposals of 350-500 words either by email to pcesarini@usouthal.edu and bmclaugh@jaguar1.usouthal.edu or by snail mail to Pat Cesarini or Becky McLaughlin, Department of English, University of South Alabama, 5991 USA Drive, N., Room 240, Mobile, AL 36688.

Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2012.

CFP: Death and Dying in Literature (4/1/02; collection of essays)

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:28:46 -0500

Previously unpublished critical essays are being sought for a new volume tentatively entitled The Final Crossing: Death and Dying in Literature. Since the publication of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s landmark study On Death and Dying (1969), thanatology has attracted keen attention from various fields of study, including psychology, psychiatry, sociology, gerontology, and medical ethics. Interestingly, thanatologists in those areas frequently turn to literature in their study of death and the phenomena and practices related to it. Considering that death and dying is a prominent theme, motif, and symbol in world literature, it is no wonder that they find literary works resourceful. The Final Crossing aims to collect scholarly essays on death and dying in literature for those who might be interested in this fundamental but ignored topic in literary studies.

The essays will be grouped in 3-5 thematic categories, such as “The Way We Die,” “Death and Spirituality,” “Death and Ethical Issues,” “Those Left Behind,” and “Death and Dying in Postmodernism.” (Section titles will be modified based on the types of submitted essays.)

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
*Death as an expression of personal experience
*Death as a reflection of cultural meanings or symbols
*Death as a literary device
*Death and Postmodernism

We welcome submissions from both literary scholars and nonliterary academics who have some background in literature and the humanities. To express interest and request more detailed information, please e-mail John J. Han at hanjn_at_mobap.edu. Abstracts of proposed essays (500 words) and a brief professional vita should be submitted as Word attachments by April 1, 2012. Deadline for completed essays of 15-20 pages is November 1, 2012. We plan to finish editing accepted submissions by April 1, 2013. An academic publisher in Amsterdam responded positively to our proposal and is willing to consider the entire manuscript.

John J. Han, Ph.D.
Professor of English and Creative Writing
Missouri Baptist University
St. Louis, MO 63141-8660
(314) 392-2311
hanjn_at_mobap.edu

C. Clark Triplett, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President for Graduate Studies and Academic Program Review
Professor of Psychology and Sociology
Missouri Baptist University
St. Louis, MO 63141-8660
(314) 392-2221
triplett_at_mobap.edu

[UPDATE] CFP - This Rough Magic - Essays

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:40:37 -0500

This Rough Magic is a journal dedicated to the art of teaching Medieval and Renaissance Literature. We are seeking academic, teachable articles that focus on, but are not limited to, the following categories:

•Authorship
•Genre Issues
•Narrative Structure
•Poetry
•Drama
•Epic
•Nation/Empire/Class
•Economics
•History
•Religion
•Superstition
•Philosophy and Rhetoric
•Race/Ethnicity
•Multi-Culturalism
•Gender
•Sexuality
•Art

For more information, please visit our website:
www.thisroughmagic.org

Submission deadline for our upcoming summer issue is May 1, 2012. Faculty and Graduate Students are encouraged to submit.

This Rough Magic is affiliated with the following academic institutions:

•Bridgewater State University
•The Catholic University of America
•Newman University
•State University of New York - Stony Brook
•Suffolk County Community College

[UPDATE] “Rough Music”: Representing Violence (March 31, 2012)

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:31:46 -0500

In The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Žižek describes Lacan's readings of classical, literary, and philosophical texts as "a case of violent appropriation…displacing the work from its proper hermeneutic context." And yet, he argues, "this very violent gesture brings about a breathtaking 'effect of truth'" and "a shattering new insight."

This conference, hosted by the English Department at Southern Methodist University, invites graduate students to interpret and explore the function of violence in all of its multitudinous forms, including, but not limited to, its function in literature. We invite proposals for consideration that reflect any and all interdisciplinary explorations of violence as trope, historical event or discursive technique.

Papers may engage violence from a variety of directions and deal with violence in any of the arenas in which it arises: politics, cultural studies, class, ethnic and racial discourses, gender, religion or in the very act of writing itself. Papers might examine questions such as:

• How do physical acts of violence obfuscate systemic violence? How does literary writing participate in or act against that obfuscation?
• How is violence enacted in, on or through a text?
• Why do some texts marginalize violence, pushing it off-screen, while other texts foreground it, making it a central part of their subject or, at times, the subject itself?
• What happens to a subject who is subjected to violence, physically or systemically?

The keynote speaker for this conference will be Dr. Richard Rankin Russell, Associate Professor of English at Baylor University. Dr. Russell specializes in 20th century British and Irish literatures. Among his numerous publications, Dr. Russell’s most recent book, Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland (2010) was published by Notre Dame University Press. It received the 2011 SCMLA award and 2010 SAMLA award for best book published by a member of the association.

Please submit a 250-word abstract for your 20-minute presentation to smugradconference@gmail.com by February 15, 2012. Please specify your institutional affiliation, if applicable, and any technological requests.

[UPDATE] CFP - This Rough Magic - Short Essays

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:30:32 -0500

This Rough Magic is a journal dedicated to the art of teaching Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

All too often, the same canonical works and authors find their way into Medieval and Renaissance Literature courses. While canonical literature is extremely important and not to be avoided, a great many authors (i.e., Cyril Tourneur) and texts (i.e., Life of St. Margaret of Antioch) go un-noticed. We are therefore looking for short essays that encourage readers to try non-traditional, over-looked, teachable texts inside their classrooms.

For more information, please visit our website at:
www.thisroughmagic.org. Submission deadline for our upcoming summer issue is May 1st, 2012. Faculty and Graduate Students are encouraged to submit.

This Rough Magic is affiliated with the following academic institutions.

•Bridgewater State University
•The Catholic University of America
•Newman University
•State University of New York - Stony Brook
•Suffolk County Community College

[UPDATE] Deadline extended to February 10th "Retrofitting English Studies: When Diversity Becomes an Afterthought"

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:45:40 -0500

“Retrofitting English Studies: When Diversity Becomes an Afterthought”
April 7-8, 2012

Speaker: Jay Dolmage

Jay Dolmage’s 2008 essay, “Mapping Composition: Inviting Disability in the Front Door,” asks what it means to challenge the literal and metaphorical structures designed for certain bodies, specifically within the academy. With diversity becoming a buzzword across universities, this conference seeks to examine what Dolmage calls “retrofitting the university” with regard to the issues surrounding diversity. Retrofitting, an update of an existing system with new or improved technologies, is the solution for many non-accessible structures and services to become compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). Dolmage asks us to think about this concept in the academy, and the ways in which retrofitting squeezes in marginalized peoples into a structure that already places certain peoples outside of its walls.

The inaugural inter-collegial Texas A&M University Graduate Conference, sponsored by the English Graduate Student Association, invites papers that examine the responses to diversity, specifically the ways in which retrofitting becomes the (inadequate) solution to issues of diversity. We are looking for presentations that engage, complicate, or challenge the concept of retrofitting in response to diversity across all disciplines and interests.

This conference seeks to bring together multiple perspectives, including, but not limited to those within the English Studies model, i.e. growing literary subfields, such as Children’s Literature and Film Studies; emerging interdisciplinary fields, such as Disability Studies and Digital Humanities; and historically established practices, such as Rhetoric and Creative Writing. Most importantly, we encourage proposals that create spaces and dialogues, complicate discussions, and challenge definitions in order to make diversity an integral and relevant part of the academy instead of an afterthought.

We invite graduate students of all levels from all disciplines and concentrations. Creative writers, artists, and performers are also strongly encouraged to apply.

Possible topics include:

- In what ways do academic fields and university departments invite “well-rounded scholars,” and are these ways problematic? Why?
- In what ways do academic disciplines marginalize fields? What are the implications of this?
- What are the implications of tokenizing diversity?
- How can varying interests and concentrations help build diverse departments and fields?
- How does cultural relevancy affect the way we understand works of literature?
- How do genres affect portrayals of diversity?
- How can recognizing our own cultural biases affect our pedagogical practices?

Please send your proposals of no more than 500 words to tamugradconference@gmail.com by February 10th, 2012.

Edge: A Graduate Journal for German and Scandinavian Studies is accepting submissions for its third edition

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:15:48 -0500

Edge: A Graduate Journal for German and Scandinavian Studies is
accepting submissions for its third edition. We are seeking
original scholarly research as well as book and film reviews.
Edge is a peer-reviewed, open access, interdisciplinary graduate
student journal. The journal is published annually under the
direction of graduate students in the German and Scandinavian
Studies program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with
the support of the W.E.B.DuBois Library.

Edge welcomes article submissions from all disciplines with a
connection to German and Scandinavian Studies, including but not
limited to art history, comparative literature, cultural studies,
history, film and media studies, and philology.
The deadline to be considered for the next publication is February 13, 2012.

Learn more about Edge and submit papers electronically at our website:
http:// scholarworks.umass.edu/edge/

Books for Review:
Daniel Purdy. On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.

John Urang. Legal Tender: Love and Legitimacy in the East German
Cultural Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.

Nina Wotiszek. The Origins of the “Regime of Goodness”:Remapping the Cultural History of Norway. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2011.

Rafik Schami. The Calligrapher’s Secret. Trans. Anthea Bell.
Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2011. Translated from the German original: Das Geheimnis des Kalligraphen. München: Carl Hanser Verlag,
2008.
---. Damascus Nights. Trans. Philip Boehm. Northampton: Interlink
Books, 2011. Translated from the German original: Erzähler der Nacht.Weinheim & Basel: Beltz Verlag, 1989.

---. The Dark Side of Love. Trans. Anthea Bell. Northampton: Interlink Books, 2009. Translated from the German original: Dunkle Seite der Liebe. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004.
Wiggin, Bethany. Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680-1730. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Film for Review:
Kurz & Gut Macht Schule. Goethe Institut Zentrale. DVD

If you are interested in reviewing one of these books or films, or would like to suggest an alternate title for review please email the editors at

EdgeGraduateJournal@gmail.com

If you are an advanced graduate student or new professional (5 years or fewer in the field) and interested in serving as a peer reviewer,please email the editors a copy of your CV and a list of research specialties to EdgeGraduateJournal@gmail.com

Edge Editorial Board: Katrin Bahr, Benjamin Duclos, Maureen O.
Gallagher, Kevina King, Victoria Rizo Lenshyn, and Delene Case White.

HISTORICAL FUTURES: new directions in early modern historicism [deadline extended]

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:09:07 -0500

HISTORICAL FUTURES: new directions in early modern historicism

full name / name of organization:

CUNY Graduate Center Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group

contact email:

mplunkett@gc.cuny.edu

HISTORICAL FUTURES

17 February 2012 in New York City

We call for papers on how we in English studies do historical work now, in the "sea change" (to borrow Jonathan Gil Harris's description from Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare) the discipline is undergoing amid the decline of New Historicism. The conference will braid concerns broached in two exciting courses going on this year at the GC: one on early cultural memory studies including intersections with memory and trauma theories going on this fall and another on new directions for history play studies including intersections with affect theory slated for the spring. We are hoping to have a streamlined, intimate conference - a few well-tuned student papers to set in dialogue with those of our professional speakers as well as time for response, feedback, and conversation so that graduate student participants leave with useful feedback with which to develop their projects.

Confirmed speakers:

Thomas Fulton, Rutgers University
Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England
Rethinking Historicism: Essays on Early Modern Literature and Culture (ed., with Ann Baynes Coiro)

Molly Murray, Columbia University
Poetics of Conversion: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden
“Measured Sentences: Forming Literature in the Early Modern Prison,” HLQ

John Staines, John Jay College
The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560-1690: Rhetoric, Passions, and Political Literature
“The Historicist Tradition in Spenser Studies,” Oxford Handbook of Spenser

We welcome abstracts for papers involving these or other related topics:

-new(er) historicism(s)
-old historicism resurgent, reevaluated
-historical formalism
-interventions into historicism by affect, queer, gender, memory, trauma theories
-presentism and anachronism
-cultural materialism, thing theory
-new approaches to the English history play
-'minor,' 'soft,' subversive, experimental, radical history/historiography
-'anachronic' early modern tendencies
-taskscapes, dynamograms, lost worlds, multiple pasts
-historical fiction, historical fictions

Send abstracts of 300-400 words to emig.conference@gmail.com. Abstracts will be accepted on a rolling basis until Friday January 20th. Papers from disciplines other than English and those experimental or innovative in form are especially welcome.

Sponsors:

PhD Program in English
Renaissance Studies Certificate Program
Doctoral Students' Council