renaissance

2016 marks the 500th anniversary of the first printing of Thomas More's Utopia, the text that created and provided the name for its own genre. Since the appearance of More's text, utopias have been imagined as unreal realities and worlds where people exist according to a specific vision of an author, whose aim might be justice, art, or an imagined reality with a specific agenda.

We request abstracts that address any aspect of early modern utopianism. Please submit 250-300 word abstracts along with a brief bio or a one page C.V. by May 15, 2016 to: Dr. Ruth McIntyre, rmcinty1@kennesaw.edu.

Film Adaptation: Theory, Practices, Reception

School of Film Studies and School of English
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

May 25-27, 2017
Thessaloniki

Keynote Speaker: Deborah Cartmell

Site: http://filmadaptationthessaloniki2017.web.auth.gr/

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR THE 31TH ANNUAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE IN THE HUMANITIES

The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, the College of Arts and Humanities, and the University of West Georgia (UWG) invite you to celebrate the 31th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference in the Humanities, September 22-September 24, 2016. We welcome submissions from across the Humanities, Fine Arts, and the Social and Natural Sciences, dealing with NATURE/CULTURE/COMMERCE and its many crossroads and intersections. Papers, exhibits, performances and screenings may be submitted by scholars, graduate students, writers, artists, and performers. Papers in French, German, or Spanish are welcome when part of a pre-organized panel.

The recent refugee crisis in Europe has brought to the fore the pressing aspects of the precarious nature of human life. This is not a sudden crisis as scholars have traced its historical roots with the exploits of "Western" capitalism, imperialism, environment, and war on terror. Such engagement has also given us different politico-philosophical points of analysis of the condition: for instance, the rise of terms such as "precariat," "new subaltern," "precarity" (Guy Standing; Simon During), the debates on "Anthropocene" and "capitalocene" (Dipesh Chakraborty; Jason W Moore), or the interest in neuro-biological or communal human affects (Catherine Malabou; Judith Butler). Added to such is the challenge of the machines and objects in our daily life.

Babies perform a lot of narrative work. George Eliot's Middlemarch narrator playfully quips that "where there was a baby, things were right enough," and that "error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force," and this is often as true for narratives themselves as for the characters therein. Babies often serve as forces of disruption or normatization in literary texts, and this panel seeks to explore the narrative work that the (pro)creative and (pro)created bodies of mothers and babies perform. This panel seeks to situate the creative work of female reproduction in the context of its narrative creation, taking seriously the textual creation and performance of fertility in literary texts.