modernist studies

ERC Advanced Grant AGRELITA

The Reception of Ancient Greece in pre-modern French Literature and Illustrations of Manuscripts and Printed Books (1320-1550): How invented memories shaped the identity of European communities

Direction : Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas

https://agrelita.hypotheses.org/

The Scottish Archipelago. Literatures and cultures of Scottish islands, of Scottish insularity, of Scotland as an island, or of islands of Scottishness around Britain and the globe: whether homogeneous or heterogeneous, chained together or scattered apart in diaspora.

Please write to Sam Baker at sebaker@utexas.edu with expressions of interest or full proposals (250 word abstract + short cv)

The short story has proven to be fertile ground for writers seeking to interrogate what the act of recording lives and the search for meaning entails, often through imagined renderings of the machineries of archive. In works such as Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” Danilo Kis’s “The Encyclopedia of the Dead,” and Ivan Vladislavic’s “The Loss Library,” for example, writers engage with “the forces that govern preservation and erasure” in line with this year’s MMLA convention theme. 

This panel seeks papers that consider how these and other concerns find expression through the short story form.

Please consider submitting a short (250 word) proposal for this guaranteed panel sponsored by the Robert Graves Society.

In “Narrating the Past,” British historian Alun Munslow defines “history as a ‘literature of fact’” (23), “an aesthetic undertaking” (17), and a “storied form of knowledge” (17). Continuing the conversations related to “Times and Places,” to be held at the 17th International Robert Graves Conference in Palma, Mallorca, Spain (July 2026), this panel deliberates Graves’s and his literary associates’ historical, geographic, and historiographic legacies. 

Californian Williams Seeking papers that elaborate Williams’s relationship to California and West Coast culture, broadly defined or focused on various Los Angeles poetry scenes, Williams’s reading tours, engagement with Hollywood, or relations to western modernism. One-page abstract to Mark C. Long mlong@keene.edu no later than Friday, March 20, 2026

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

A Cultural History of the Avant-garde in East Asia

Part of: Cultural Histories of the Avant-Garde: A Companion Series (www.brill.com/CHAG)

The companion series is part of an ongoing, large-scale project launched by De Gruyter Brill (a merger of two international publishing houses) that uncovers the cultural history of the avant-garde in major regions of the world. The series on East Asia consists of four volumes, each dealing with specific decades and topics as follows: 

Building the Avant-Garde Abroad: East-Central European Artists in Paris

18–19 September, 2026, Institut Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris 

Seminar for Modernist Studies Association Conference

How text appears on the page has been of periodic interest to poets for centuries. This interest grew in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century poets as shown by the work of Stephane Mallarmé and by artistic movements such as Dada. Concrete poetry, a style of poetry mostly from Germany and Brazil in the 1950’s (Thomas) adhered to this interest. Other types of experimental poetry have worked on the liminal edges between text and image, where the appearance of the text supersedes its content, as in more recent work by Susan Howe. Generally speaking, as Greg Thomas argues, this poetry is “concerned with complicating or undermining linguistic sense” (Thomas 4) in its turn to the visual.

The D H Lawrence Society of North America and the Joseph Conrad Society of America are seeking panel papers on the themes of exile and emancipation in the works of both Lawrence and Conrad.  Proposals specialized on either author will be considered for inclusion, but we are especially interested in papers that address both of these important writers in a comparative or interdisciplinary manner.  In either case, early for Conrad and later for Lawrence, the author left his home country in the interests of a less constrained existence elsewhere, thereby raising the possibilities of exilic nostalgia and regret.  At the same time, both equally sought spaces of freedom and movement in expatriat

Seeking submissions exploring the formal contours of ecopoetics across time, cultural traditions, and media environments.

250-word abstract, brief bio and CV by March 20, 2026. 

Nikki Skillman, Indiana University-Bloomington

nskillma@iu.edu

Call for Book Proposals: Secrecy in Literature and Culture Secrecy in Literature and Culture (Edinburgh University Press) Series Editors: Simon Cooke (University of Edinburgh) and Natalie Ferris (University of Bristol) We invite proposals for critical studies exploring the pivotal role of secrecy in literature and culture, with interdisciplinary, international and transhistorical scopeThe ‘secret’ is a concept of pivotal importance across a range of disciplines – from political studies of espionage and the ethics of intelligence work to law, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies – inflected by diverse cultural and historical contexts, and in terms of gender, sexuality, race and cla