religion

"The United States," says Bruce Cumings, "is the only great power with long Atlantic and Pacific coasts, making it simultaneously an Atlantic and a Pacific nation." Yet, theorizations of transnational America conventionally focus on one or the other, not both. This seminar explores the challenge of situating America bicoastally as a problem of epistemology that engaging with American literary and philosophical histories can illuminate. We posit alongside Carolyn Porter that what vexes the American subject's ability to position itself in history and geography is an Emersonian literary tradition of ahistorical and reified consciousness.

The 13th annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies invites graduate students to submit proposals that engage broadly with the notion of marginalia. We welcome interdisciplinary submissions ranging in historical focus from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. Our topic is intended to be expansive rather than limiting; while papers may certainly consider marginalia as they appear in manuscripts, they are also welcome to dwell on other kinds of marginal entities—be they social groups, texts, dialects, etc. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

No Person Shall Bee Any Wise Molested:
Religious Freedom, Cultural Conflict, and the Moral Role of the State

A conference planned for October 3 - 6, 2013, in Newport and Providence, Rhode
Island, organized by the Newport Historical Society, the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, Salve Regina University, the George Washington
Institute for Religious Freedom, the John Carter Brown Library, and Brown
University, and the Rhode Island Historical Society to mark the 350th anniversary of the 1663 Rhode Island Charter.

What is religious toleration? What are its functions, effects, and limits in society? How has it manifested (or not) around the world in human history?

Do digital platforms change the way we remember? How will the myriad tracks we leave behind online shape the historical practices of the future? When and how do digital technologies in the classroom move from being novel experiments to transparent modes of teaching? How does digitization reshape archives and archival methodologies? How does metadata contribute to forgetting and the shape of memory? How do we define and put into practice the growing field of Digital Humanities?

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We welcome papers concentrating on 'spaces' that could be considered 'monstrous' or are in some way capable of creating 'monstrosity.' Spaces may be real or imagined, literal or metaphorical, psychological or material. Literal places may include sites of trauma, genocide, or biological experimentation; dystopias; colonized regions; mythical lands; etc. Psychological spaces may include memory, neurosis, philosophy, etc. Monstrosity may be perceived as depravity; social or sexual taboos; hegemonic power in the form of racism, classism, sexism; etc. Papers may challenge, call to light, or reinforce perceptions of monstrosity.

Stet, the online postgraduate journal of the English Department at King's College London, is now recruiting postgraduate peer-reviewers for a themed issue on the concept of 'Dis/Orientation' in literature of all periods. We are looking for doctoral students who are interested in gaining experience and developing career-relevant skills in the publishing process. As peer reviewer for Stet, you will screen and blind-review a manuscript article and produce a short evaluation report.

IDIOSYNCRASY
A Graduate Conference by the Ph.D. Program in French at the CUNY Graduate Center

« On ne peut être normal et vivant à la fois. »
–E.M. Cioran

« On n'est peut-être pas fait pour un seul moi. On a tort de s'y tenir. Préjugé de l'unité. »
–Henri Michaux

CINEMA: JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE MOVING IMAGE invites submissions for its 4th issue.

Re/Inventions 2013: Hysteria
2nd Annual Graduate Student Conference
California State University, Long Beach
Tentative Date: Thursday, 11 April 2013

Abstracts Due: Tuesday, 1 January 2013

The Graduate Students of the Duke University Department of History are pleased to invite graduate students in the humanities and social sciences to submit papers for Navigating Place and Power, an annual one-day conference at Duke University on Friday, February 15, 2013. Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Thomas Laqueur, professor of history at University of California, Berkeley. This interdisciplinary conference will seek to promote dialogue between scholars of various disciplines in order to explore how individuals and groups negotiate systems of power. Papers may engage with various scales of power and explore dimensions of place, from broad transnational networks to the politics of everyday life.

This special topics panel seeks papers that explore the relationship between religion or religious practice and the hand-drawn image in all of its forms, from comics and illustrations in childrens literature to animated cartoons.

In addition to papers on individual texts or artists whose work merits consideration given the topic, we are also interested in papers responsive to the following questions:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison's ninth annual Graduate Conference on Language and Literature (MadLit) will be held February 28–March 1, 2013. This year's conference, "Between Surface and Depth," investigates how humanistic disciplines articulate notions of superficiality and depth in their scholarly practices. Building from the debates surrounding Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's "Surface Reading: An Introduction" (Representations 108.1 (Fall 2009): 1–21), this conference will explore the implications of using spatial models to conceptualize the location of meaning in language, literature, and discourse.

"Alt," neither a word nor a prefix in the grammatical sense, has nevertheless been a generative concept in contemporary scholarly interrogations of non-normative ways of engaging with and inhabiting the world. Various fields and disciplines have begun to investigate the meaning, value, and application of alt, inviting critical discourses around questions of alterities, alternations, and alternatives. From considering relations with others to shifting theoretical frameworks to imagining alternate realities, alt complicates periodizations, genres, identities, subjectivities, epistemologies, and discourses.

Cinematic Melodrama

This panel will explore cinematic melodrama in relation to literature, visual arts, opera, politics, morality, or religion. Papers that analyze specific use of posture, gesture, and spatial and musical categories are encouraged. All theoretical approaches are welcome. Please send a 250-300 word abstract and brief biographical note by November 15, 2012 to maria.catrickes@yale.edu.