In her 2020 article entitled “Communities of care,” Talia Schaffer reminds readers that even when participants “did not share a geographic space,” the communities of those “virtual groups…cobbled together in coronavirus time” were, to all of us, of invaluable importance and “realness,” nevertheless. Thus, this roundtable hopes to promote conversation(s) that showcase and contemplate ways of enduringly enriching both virtual and in-person academic communities, especially amongst graduate students; to continually encourage communications and collaborations between students with related research interests within the same, as well as different, institutional settings.

Possible topics for discussion might be related to:

"Generations and Generational Time in the United States During the Long Nineteenth Century"

Lille University, June 12-13, 2025

Old age and aging are biological as well as sociocultural constructs and processes; they cannot be completely separated, but rather they influence each other and get interrelated with the passing of time. As sociocultural constructs, old age, aging and their definition are not immovable concepts and, in fact, vary depending on the different historical, social and cultural contexts.   Likewise, the definition and organization of each of the population groups by age are not fixed. For example, for decades, 65+ has been agreed upon by the UN and the WHO, among others, as the beginning of old age; however, market studies propose 50+ and establish two groups: 50+ seniors and 75+ seniors.

Body Augmentation: Possibilities of Identities and Technology in/of Video Games

A MultiPlay Network Conference, October 28th, 2024

Abstracts due: 30 August 2024

As is tradition for MultiPlay, we have a special horror related conference for the end of October. This time we are focusing on the monstrous (and liberational!) possibilities of body augmentation through video games. We welcome abstracts from utopian and dystopian perspectives, on the real life hardware capabilities or upon representations of augmentation within games.

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Conference 2025

Philadelphia, PA

6-9 March 2025

In 21st-century Ireland, women have experienced several (r)evolutions in their political rights that have, in turn, shaped the imagination of the nation. Irish abortion law faced a major public challenge with the 2012 death of Savita Halappanavar after she was denied an abortion while suffering a septic miscarriage; in 2018, lawmakers passed a law that allows abortion up to week 12 of pregnancy, a small victory in a nation where abortion under any circumstances beyond saving the life of the mother was forbidden.

In educational settings, safeguarding free speech is crucial for upholding democratic principles, yet campuses increasingly face censorship and suppression of dissenting voices. By fostering an environment that values free expression and respectful dialogue, educators can prepare students to become informed citizens who think critically and contribute positively to the (r)evolution of democratic society. How do educators include censored, controversial and diverse perspectives into their curriculum and classroom?

https://cfplist.com/nemla/User/SubmitAbstract/20978

“In this nineteenth century, the religious idea is undergoing a crisis,” Victor Hugo declares in Les Misérables (1864); “People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.” Nineteenth-century culture is marked by intertwined revolutions in literature and religion. Across the globe, just as religion became increasingly questioned, it also became fuel for social change and cultural reformation.

Educators empower students through narrative nonfiction and writing that allows for empathy, candid discussion, and articulation of self. This roundtable will seek to examine how narrative nonfiction literature and writing is used in a variety of contexts and courses to engage students and empower them to embrace facets of their identities and strengthen their ties to our national and international community.

This roundtable seeks collegiate voices that will contribute to a robust conversation on narrative nonfiction literature and writing with a focus on how we use narrative nonfiction and writing to help students navigate conceptions of their identity and negotiate their place in the world. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

Call for Essays

Studies in Memory of Donald C. Baker (1928-2019)

Call for essays for a book on the late medievalist Donald C. Baker who left us in 2019.

Donald C. Baker taught English Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for twenty years then pursued teaching opportunities in Finland, England, Tunisia, Jordan, and Macau. 

Donald C. Baker published or co-published a variety of books and articles (in PMLA, Studia Neophilologica, Speculum, Studies in Philology, Philological Quarterly, The Literary)  on Geoffrey Chaucer and Beowulf in particular.

All forms of liteary studies (around 6,000 words using APA style) are welcome.

“Austin Clarke, Black Studies and Black Diasporic Memory”

Conference Dates: September 26 - 27, 2024,

Deadline for abstracts: July 31, 2024

Notification of decisions by: August 15, 2024

Co-organizers: Ronald Cummings (McMaster University), Darcy Ballantyne (Toronto Metropolitan University), 

Keynote Speaker: Rinaldo Walcott, 

Professor and Chair in Africana and American Studies, University at Buffalo

We are constantly engaged in processes of reading. We read literary texts, historical sources, films and other media, political moods and affects, and shifting social formations. Amongst the plethora of reading strategies available to us, close reading is perhaps the most widely known and most accepted one in literary studies (cf. I.A. Richards and William Empson). Other approaches to texts include ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative reading’ (Sedgwick 1997), ‘distant reading’ (Moretti 2000), ‘wide reading’ (Hallet 2010), and ‘surface reading’ (Best and Marcus 2009), to name just a few. More recent research has examined intermedial reading practices (Rippl 2015), the reading of affects (Brinkema 2014), and non/institutional readers (Emre 2017). 

The Environmental Humanities is currently experiencing an unprecedented influx of creative and critical works from writers of Indigenous literature. This literary revolution, closely linked to climate change and environmental discourse, is a contributing factor, and writers are at the forefront of this contemporary debate. This session offers a unique opportunity for presenters to contribute to a significant academic debate by exploring paradigm shifts in Indigenous environmental discourse. The works will delve into the intersection of gender, class, race, and the Anthropocene, offering a comprehensive understanding.

2027 would mark 80 years of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent of 1947. For South Asia, independence from over two centuries of British rule in 1947 was accompanied by a violent and bloody partition - a territorial division of two provinces of British India, Punjab and Bengal  - on the basis of religious majority, which led to a million people dead in bloody communal riots and fifteen million people uprooted and displaced across the newly-formed borders.