This panel welcomes essays exploring the different ways Modern British writers began to re-think human sexuality, sexual identity, and/or gender in their texts. Possible topics might include any of the following: the influence of Havelock Ellis's theories about human sexuality on specific writers, how writers respond to cultural discourse/debate about gender and sexual identity, sexual epiphany, sexual repression, social mechanization and the body, post-WWI society and shifting sexual mores, etc. Please email a title and a 200-300 word abstract to Sharla Hutchison, Fort Hays State University, shutchis@fhsu.edu. Deadline: June 25, 2009.

Recent literary studies have generally assumed that regionalism emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century in response to the consolidation of the modern nation-state, imperial expansion, and industrialization, all of which tended to efface cultural, and to some extent geographical, differences among sub-national communities. Yet during the long eighteenth century, various literary and cultural developments—from newspapers, novels, dictionaries, and poems, to antiquarianism, topography, travel writings, and statistical surveys— reflected, and arguably participated in creating, local and regional forms of community.

Like Godot, a proper translation of Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' is never here, it is always 'still on the way.' Since it now appears that we may finally get the long-awaited new
translation, this would be a good time to discuss some of the possibilities -- and some of the dangers -- that the new translation will present. Some ideas, intended to spur possible topics but by no means to limit them: