Now in its tenth year, the AUM Southern Studies Conference invites panel and paper proposals on any aspect of Southern literature. The conference will be held 9-10 February 2018. Topics may include but are not limited to:

Ireland, Irish America, and Work is the theme of the 33rd annual meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies-Western Regional [ACIS-West] for Oct. 19-22, 2017 at the Davenport Hotel in Spokane, Washington. Many prominent members of the American Labor Movement were Irish and Irish-American. Jim Larkin and James Connolly worked for the I.W.W in both Ireland and the United States, where, in 1917, the I.W.W. began to face vicious repression. By July 1917, federal troops began to be used to suppress industrial conflicts, to raid I.W.W. halls, to break up meetings, and to arrest Wobblies. In Spokane, Irish I.W.W. leader James Rowan was arrested and sent to Leavenworth.

Featuring

“New Directions in Africana Literature”

This panel welcomes papers that explore the contours and contexts of contemporary Africana Literature.  We invite presenters to consider potential new scholarly directions for emerging writers of African descent as well as established writers whose recent works address the imperatives of the current moment.  We especially encourage presenters whose work addresses the SAMLA 89 theme, “High Art / Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture.”  Other themes that panelists might address in their work include, but are not limited to:

Percy's practice and thoughts on art - and the human experience - range from high to low, from immanence to transcendence.   Was Percy's philosophy an abstracted high art and his fiction, a low art, for conveying the same message, but in the humble context of physical life?  Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, talked of the low art of movies (as they were considered during his time) as escape, but also serving a higher purpose of self-realization.  He writes of the movie magazine as the "low slick."   But the Moviegoer ends with the high art of the church, a conduit for the divine.   Percy wrote of the orbit and re-entry of the artist, going from high to low.

Call for PAMLA 2017 Conference Proposals:  Film Studies Panel

Please consider submitting a proposal for the PAMLA Film Studies panel.  You may submit a proposal on any topic, but below is the conference theme, in if you're interested in addressing it.  Submit proposals using the online process at https://www.pamla.org/2017.  Questions can be submitted to Dawn.Dietrich@wwu.edu.

“The Sense of Sight: Visuality, Visibility, and Ways of Seeing” (Deadline for proposals:  May 21st,  2017)

The PG CWWN (Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network) are delighted to announce our next biennial conference, Fast Forward: Women’s Writing in the 21st Century, to be held at Sheffield Hallam University on 8th-9th September 2017.

Fast Forward: Women’s Writing in the 21st Century

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.” (Zadie Smith)