“The End of the Human(ities)”

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois explained that the problem of the color line was a problem of (meta)physical and educational implications for those who “still seek, the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think.” Du Bois’s “freedom” connected the liberation of the body, soul, and mind—the desire to live and learn unbounded—to the human. He introduced a quandary still relevant today: To think and be human is to think about how to study life through the “humanities.”

This is a call for paper for the NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) 2024 panel on spoken word poetry. The convention will take place in Boston from 7th to 10th March 2024. The panel invite papers that address the rich form of spoken word poetry in any of its manifestations within the UK and US scenes.

 This panel is interested in the mediation of popular visual idioms in North American Indigenous contemporary art. Imagined as a "shared language," pop culture offers Indigenous artists a set of mediums, forms, and figures for representing shared experiences of survivance across disparate and distinct transnational and tribal contexts. Prior to its “discovery” and appropriation by metropolitan modernists in the 1920s and 1930s, Indigenous material culture circulated commercially in the early 1900s. Creators of this material culture navigated market appetites by introducing innovative designs often through new mediums.

The Northeast Popular/American Culture Association (NEPCA) The Body, Fashion, and Popular Culture Area invites submissions for NEPCA’s annual conferenceto be held online October 12 – October 14, 2023, via the Zoom platform.

 In alignment with this subject matter area at the national level:

Please consider submitting an abstract for the NeMLA session "Romantic Religions: Re-evaluating Secularism in the Romantic Era" (55th Annual NeMLA Convention March 7th in Boston, MA). The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2023. You can submit an abstract for this session here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20719

Session Abstract: How does our understanding of religion in the Romantic era shape our interpretation and evaluation of Romantic thought and literature? How might we reconsider Romantic literature within the contexts of religious surplus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

They Live: Female Monsters and Their Impact on the Frankenstein Tradition

Sponsored by the Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association

Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa

Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2023

55th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association

Sheraton Boston Hotel (Boston, MA)

On-site event: 7-10 March 2024

See the shared Google Doc for the full call with a list of bibliographic resources on the topic: https://tinyurl.com/They-Live-NeMLA-2024.  

Special Issue of Nineteenth Century Studies:

Blackness, Race, and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Studies

deadline for submission: August 15, 2024

full name(s)/name of organization:

Wendy Castenell and A. Maggie Hazard co-editors/Nineteenth-Century Studies

contact email(s): wcastenell@wlu.edu; ahazar1@saic.edu; TBD

The Societas Ovidiana welcomes proposals for a virtual roundtable to be held at the International Congress of Medieval Studies (ICMS) at Kalamazoo, May 9-11 2024.

This roundtable invites short presentations based on concrete studies of particular manuscripts (or sets of manuscripts) containing works by, or in any way involving, Ovid.

The Shelley Conference 2024

Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations

Keats House Museum, London, 28-29 June 2024

Two years after the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the summer of 1822, Mary Shelley, after a painstaking editorial process, published Posthumous Poems (1824). The volume contained much of Shelley’s major poetry, including the hitherto unpublished ‘Julian and Maddalo’, together with translations of Goethe and Calderón, and unfinished compositions such as ‘The Triumph of Life’ and ‘Charles the First’. 

Comics Get Medieval 2023: New Work on the Comics Medium in Medieval Studies (virtual)

Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 15 August 2023

The Medieval in Cyberspace: 2023 International Conference for the Study of Medievalism

The UNICORN Castle (https://unicorn-castle.org/)

Online event: Thursday, 26 October, through Saturday, 28 October, 2023

Comics Get Medieval 2023: New Work on the Comics Medium in Medieval Studies (virtual)

Sponsoring Organization: Medieval Comics Project

Organizers: Michael A. Torregrossa, Richard Scott Nokes, and Carl Sell

In the realm of literature, grief and loss have always occupied a profound space, weaving their intricate threads through the narratives of countless tales. From the ancient Greek tragedies to contemporary works, the exploration of human suffering and its aftermath has captivated the imaginations of readers and critics alike. However, delving deeper into the recesses of these literary landscapes, we encounter a concept that extends beyond the boundaries of ordinary grief—a surplus of grief that emerges, often unyielding and overwhelming, in the face of profound loss and trauma.

Call for Papers: “Mixed Race Shakespeares,” a Special Issue of The Shakespearean International Yearbook (Routledge)

Special Section Editor: Adele Lee (Emerson College, USA)

General Editor: Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University, USA)

This roundtable examines the re-location of Shakespeare in America from the angle of regional production, performance, pedagogy, culture, and impact with a focus on race, class, gender, history, and culture.

At its core, cyberpunk contrasts fantastic technological developments with dystopian society, emphasizing the persistence of extreme social, economic, and political inequalities despite evident surpluses in capital and resources that should enable higher standards of living within these imagined futures. Caroline Alphin's Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction contends that cyberpunk simultaneously impugns and maintains neoliberal cultural mentalities, anxiously illustrating dystopian futures while also indulging in individualistic fantasies of empowerment.