Friday 25-Saturday 26 May 2012

As a part of its annual series of international symposia and book publications on key themes in Australian literary studies, in May 2012, Australian Literature at the University of Sydney will host a symposium on the theme, 'Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature?'

Keynote speakers :
Professor Wai Chee Dimock (Yale University), author of Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2006) and co-editor of Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007).

Call for Papers: Teaching with Harry Potter

QUEER PLACES, PRACTICES, AND LIVES: A SYMPOSIUM IN HONOR OF SAMUEL STEWARD

The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH

MAY 18-19, 2012

Deadline for proposals: Aug. 12, 2011

Confirmed speakers
Joseph Boone, Tim Dean, Kale Fajardo, Roderick Ferguson, Brian Glavey, Scott Herring, Eithne Lubhéid, Victor Mendoza, Deborah Miranda, José Esteban Muñoz, Hoang Tan Nguyen, Juana María Rodríguez, Nayan Shah, Justin Spring, Susan Stryker, Shane Vogel

47th International Medieval Congress
Kalamazoo, Michigan
May 10-13, 2012

The construction and historicization of the Amazonian type women warriors have generated a long legacy in both Western and Eastern cultures.The ancient world's literary impulse to construct and the geographical impulse to locate the women warriors and women's kingdoms continued in the Middle Ages. Examples can be found in the writings of Boccaccio, Chaucer, De Pizan, and travel writings of Mandeville and Marco Polo. In the East, "women's kingdom" continued to evolve in Chinese literature and historiography.

In antebellum America, the notion of 'blood' as 'race' maintained a strong hold over the 19th century literary imagination. This panel will examine how antebellum literary texts worked dialectically with the new racial science of ethnology to respond to the dominant racial ideologies of the day. Mid-century works by authors as varied as Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Lydia Maria Child, and Frances E.W. Harper illustrated very clearly the instability of racial classification and its resultant sexual anxieties. Rather than phenotype, references to 'white' blood and 'black' blood came to be regarded as the primary signifiers of racial traits.

Scope:
The proposed volume will examine the varying ways in which children's literature has engaged with New York as a city space, both in terms of (urban) realism and as 'idea' (a place of opportunity, etc). The volume will explore not just dominant themes, motifs, tropes, etc but also the different narrative methods employed to inform readers about the history, function, physical structure, conceptualization, etc of New York City. The volume will also acknowledge the shared or symbiotic relationship between literature and the city: just as the literature can give imaginative 'reality' to the city, the city has the potential to shape the literary text.

The 13th Biennial Conference on Romance in Medieval Britain

Papers are invited on all aspects of medieval romance, its circulation and reception in and around the Insular Middle Ages. The conference coincides with a major exhibition, 'The Romance of the Middle Ages', at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Papers that address aspects of romance and materiality are particularly welcome, for example:
• texts and textuality, in manuscript or print
• the body and the sensual
• objects, spaces and places
• romance and medieval material culture
Information at: www.medieval.ox.ac.uk/rmb2012