The University of Chicago is proud to announce The UChicago Conference on Jersey Shore Studies, the first conference to interrogate the landmark MTV reality television show "Jersey Shore." The conference will take place at the University of Chicago on Friday, October 28th, 2011. Confirmed speakers include Candace Moore (University of Michigan), Alison Hearn (University of Western Ontario), and Brian Moylan (Gawker Media).

This roundtable will explore how scholars can foster students' civic education and build students' engagement with social concerns through various interdisciplinary methods. The aim is to uncover ways scholars can encourage students to become involved in their communities and create empowerment. We welcome discussion about teaching experiences and suggestions. Please send a 1-2 page abstract and a brief biographical statement as Word or PDF attachments to Dorsía Smith Silva at djsmithsilva@yahoo.com with NeMLA in the subject line by September 30, 2011. Please include your A/V requirements.

This panel seeks submissions dealing with the works of John Dos Passos in the interests of reviving scholarship on an author who has received scant recent critical attention. In keeping with the theme of the convention, the topic will address ways in which Dos Passos's works represent, respond to or possibly resist the forces of modernity. This panel seeks papers which address the ways Dos Passos's work renders visible the forces of modernity and seeks to resist these forces. Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to, the ways in which Dos Passos' formal experimentation deals with the issues of alienation, flows of capital, new technologies, historical fracture or social loss. Submitters are encouraged to interpret this topic broadly.

Call for Papers (no. 10/11 – 2011)

Dossier for the upcoming issue (no. 10/11) – The Sound of Silence

Organized by – ZlatkaTimenova-Valtcheva

Co-organized by – Luís Cláudio Ribeiro

Western societies, as defined by Greco-Roman philosophy and logocentrism, have traditionally considered fullness and emptiness, absence and presence, sound (in acoustics and verbal expression) and silence as in opposition and therefore mutually exclusive. However, with Judaic-Christian thought emerges the relationship between word and silence through the image of the "Spirit of God", and after St. Augustine,the human/divine language dichotomy.

Representation, Secular Violence, and the Politics of South Asian Community (Seminar)

43rd Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 15-18, 2012
Rochester, New York – Hyatt Rochester
Host Institution: St. John Fisher College
Keynote speaker: Jennifer Egan, 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad

While listening to Louis Armstrong, the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man discovers a "new" way to hear the "unheard sounds" between the beats , so that he is listening in time and space. Ellison's novel, with its turn toward music to negotiate the visual ideologies of race, is located at a site of crossings and re-crossings where the narrator realizes that "few really listen"—but even more than listening, it is a feeling of and in the space between the beats that most affects him. Such a feeling for space permits a descent into the "underworld of sound" where the narrator experiences the laugh and the cry of an old slave woman.