religion

Call for interdisciplinary papers for an edited collection of critical and creative essays relating to the topic "Deconstructing islamophobia."  Welcome critical essays engaging with how theories of race, immigration, religion, culture, postcolonial, geopolitics, gender, and class can be employed to understand the global rise of Islamophobia in recent years and how these and other idelogies can be employed to also deconstruct these attitudes.  Also welcome are essays that explore specific case studies, institutional and governmental programs that have successfully addressed tensions around Islamophobia as well as work relating to efffects of radical Islamic terrorism and the policies of the war on terror on attitudes towards Islam in different soieties.

This year's theme is "kindness."

Specific to Goddess Studies, what are some of the ways women have been portrayed as kind in religious and mythic narrative or iconography? In which ways has the personification of kindness-as-feminine been damaging to women's roles in the larger socio-political context? Does this have specific implications for narratives including LGBTQ and people of color? Are there any narratives of figures which the mainstream has adopted as malevolent, but actually have much more nuanced and complicated histories? Send your proposal to Angela Sells (omingintobeing@gmail.com.

Now in its tenth year, the AUM Southern Studies Conference invites panel and paper proposals on any aspect of Southern literature. The conference will be held 9-10 February 2018. Topics may include but are not limited to:

Bodily practices played an important role in medieval devotion, some particularly associated with female believers. One need only think of how devout women kissed manuscripts and rosaries, Beguines performed series of prostrations and genuflections, and nuns constructed own meditational processions through their convents. Some mystics are represented as engaging in more extreme bodily performances. For instance, according to her vita, thirteenth-century beguine Elizabeth of Spalbeek imitated Christ’s Passion in public, resulting in stigmata erupting on her body.    

Heidelberg Center for American Studies 15th Annual Spring Academy Conference

Heidelberg, Germany, 19-23 March, 2018

/Call for Papers/

The fifteenth HCA Spring Academy on American Culture, Geography, History, Literature, Politics & Religion will be held from March 19-23, 2018. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one-week conference that provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and discuss their Ph.D. projects.