poetry

Five days after 9/11, Republican Party activist James Pinkerton proclaimed that 'the World Trade Center has been destroyed, but this has also been a crushing defeat for irony, cynicism and hipness. Here in New York, the city that gave the world Seinfeld, Sex and the City and Studio 54, the victors now are sincerity, patriotism and earnestness' (Newsday, September 16th, 2001). Has Pinkerton's claim come true? If traditional values like sincerity, patriotism and earnestness are ascendant, what space is left for texts that risk to contest or query the status-quo? Should we abhor risk as the cause of the financial crash, or pine for risky artistic practices that might instigate change? Do we need the texts we study to be risky?

The Series
The Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (AAAWA) invites artists and writers from the Afghan diaspora in North America to participate in Distant Attachments: Unsettling Contemporary Afghan Diasporic Art, a three-day series of literary, visual, and performance art responding to the different relationships, connections, detachments, and dispositions one can have to "the homeland" in one's creative work. The program is designed to critically engage with the question of what kinds of expectations and creative freedom does being called upon as a member of a diaspora place on artists, writers, and intellectuals.

The Lehigh English Department's second annual Literature and Social Justice Graduate Conference will take place on Lehigh's campus in Bethlehem, PA, on March 4th-5th, 2016. We will be accepting proposals from Master's and Doctoral students on this year's conference theme, public humanities. Public humanities takes literature and social justice out of the confines of the classroom or academic publication by balancing theoretical concepts with practical actions and projects that benefit others in order to expand participation in and appreciation for the humanities.

Popular Modernisms: Then and Now

Proposed Edited Collection
Abstract Deadline: July 26, 2015

CALL for PROPOSALS

The Land Has a Story

Pennsylvania College English Association (PCEA) 2015 Conference
October 1-3, 2015
Hilton Scranton and Conference Center
100 Adams Avenue, Scranton, PA 18501

Keynote by Sarah Piccinni, Assistant Director
Lackawanna Historical Society