victorian

Alien invasion, viral outbreak, nuclear holocaust, the rise of the machines, the flood, the second coming, the second ice age—these are just a few of the ways human beings have imagined their "end of days." And someone's Armageddon clock is always ticking—we just dodged Harold Camping's rapture on May 21st of this year, and the Mayan-predicted doomsday of 2012 is just around the corner. In the end, what do we reveal about ourselves when we dream of the apocalypse? What are the social and political functions of these narratives in any given historical period? How do different cultures imagine the apocalypse, and what do these differences reveal? What is particular to the narratological design and content of apocalyptic texts?

Call for Papers: The Corpse and Catastrophe
ACLA 2011: Collapse/Catastrophe/Change
Providence, RI | 29 March-1 April 2012

Seminar Organizers: Karen Elizabeth Bishop (Rutgers University) and David Sherman (Brandeis University)

This seminar will examine the corpses in and of literature, including the catastrophic meaning of corpses. Papers with aesthetic, ethical, political, and historical dimensions are welcome, and might address a range of questions:

1st Global Conference
Celebrity: Exploring Critical Issues

15th March - 17th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the array of negative cosmopolitanisms operating today—all those ways in which cosmopolitan subjects are still stigmatized, disempowered, excluded, and denied. Against the superficial liberal celebration of cosmopolitan diversity in the world today, negative cosmopolitanism instead reveals experiences of rupture, exile, oppression, and imperialism. The conference will bring researchers together to explore the histories and constitution of cosmopolitanism past and present, with the aim of better understanding the complex experience of power today.

2nd Global Conference
Urban Popcultures

Friday 9th March- Sunday 11th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic

Call for Papers:
This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference aims to examine, explore
and critically engage with issues related to urban life. The project
will promote the ongoing analysis of the varied creative trends and
alternative cultural movements that comprise urban popultures and
subcultures. In particular the conference will encourage equally
theoretical and practical debates which surround the cultural and
political contexts within which alternative urban subcultures are
flourishing.