CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

CURRENTS NO. 6

NEW TRENDS IN ENGLISH STUDIES FOR THE 2020s

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the sixth issue of CURRENTS: A Journal of Young English Philology Thought and Review. CURRENTS is an open access, peer-reviewed, yearly interdisciplinary journal, based in Toruń (Nicolaus Copernicus University), addressed to young researchers in the field of English studies.

Bodies, and representations of bodies, surround our everyday existence. Our bodies, and the bodies around us, are subject to norms that police how a body should look or behave in a given context. Glamorous and desirable bodies draw positive attention and literary and cultural representations reflect this, while deviant bodies are policed and regulated. This panel aims to explore how various bodies are represented in contemporary culture as well as analyze how these representations impact our perceptions of self and world. In a moment where the international political landscape is reliant on the policing and weaponizing of bodies, it is more important than ever before to consider how conceptions of bodies foster these divisions.

We are currently accepting manuscripts for OMNES: The Journal of Multicultural Society Vol.11 No.1 that will be published on January 31, 2021. To be considered for the upcoming issue, OMNES 11(1), please submit your manuscript by October 30, 2020.

About the Journal

Critical Concepts and Readings: English Literature GCSE.

Editors: Dr Kate Watson and Dr Sally O’Gorman

This original collection invites teachers and academics to contribute a book chapter on a GCSE text, applying a theory and considering a new and innovative aspect of the literary text.

For MLA 2022, Washington D.C., ChLA + MSA Allied Organization Co-Sponsored Session (non-guaranteed)

Stories from ancient Greek myths dot the literary landscape of the early 21st century. To some extent, this has been the result of deliberate planning, as when Canongate began publishing a series of mythological retellings by well-known authors in 2005. But alongside and independent of such coordinated efforts to keep old tales alive for contemporary audiences, offerings from both established authors (David Malouf, Barry Unsworth, Colm Toibin, Pat Barker) and successful newcomers (Madeline Miller, Daisy Johnson) have likewise retold and reimagined mythical narratives in recent years.

Coronavirus disease with its global and local pandemic has been on the top agenda of Government leaders, scientists, health professionals, as well as on the daily headlines across journalistic media. New governmental measures, decrees, scientific recommendations, and sanitary campaigns  emerge everyday to combat or alleviate the pandemic which are endorsed and spread through mainstream media. On one hand, a new discourse and rhetoric has been articulated to create, support, and even impose a ‘new normal’ that reconfigures how human beings communicate, interact, and socialize in public and private spaces.

How have transatlantic imaginaries and networks played a central role in the construction of hispano-americano and Latinx identities? How have these identities embraced the political causes of the black diaspora, like antislavery, civil rights and Black Lives Matter? To what extent have artists, writers and activists triangulated the Americas, Europe and Africa in their transatlantic imaginaries? 

This panel addresses epistemic inequality in literary studies: the categories, theories and methods through which we read and conceptualize literature are still determined at the center of global academic production, while peripheral epistemologies often do not circulate beyond national borders and therefore do not take part in the shaping of the discipline.

In the last decades, the multiplications of works in the field of Witchcraft Studies made it possible to profoundly renew the approaches and the study designs of the repression of witchcraft in the late Middle Ages and in the beginning of the Early Modern Era. Consequently, research has substantially specified the methods and configurations (ideological, political and doctrinal) that contribute to the genesis of the “witch-hunt”. Research also uncovered that the repression of witchcraft could take a number of different forms depending on the contexts, the spaces studied, the sources and the aims they seem to pursue. It underlines the extreme plasticity of the accusation of witchcraft and the categories of such a crime.

Proposals are invited for a volume in the MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series entitled Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jorge Luis Borges.

Essays in this volume could address teaching Borges's work by focusing on topics such as philosophy, religion, mythology, detective fiction, gender relations/gender conflict, politics, the fantastic, history, popular literature, film and other arts, translation. Borges’ works are taught in so many different courses and contexts (Modern Languages, English, History, Philosophy, Religion) that we welcome essays teaching Borges in non-traditional settings or to non-literature students. Contributors are also invited to propose essays on topics not mentioned above.

The SWCA Board is excited to announce that the 2021 Southeastern Writing Center Association conference will be held fully online. Join us Feb. 11-13, 2021, to discuss the transformations writing center professionals and the field undertake during times of crisis and trauma. The COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice, social unrest, natural disasters, and significant changes in the structure and leadership of higher education have greatly accelerated the pace of these changes and prompted all of us in the writing center field to reconsider many aspects of our approaches to writing center work and everyday operations. Writing center professionals are called not just to react, but to proactively transform their identities, missions, and services.

Great Writing International Creative Writing Conference

24th Annual Conference

Saturday July 10 – Sunday July 11, 2021
- Virtual -

Proposals are invited for presentations at the 24th Annual Great Writing International Creative Writing Conference, to be held Saturday July 10 – Sunday July 11, 2021.

Great Writing 2021 will be virtual and presenters from around the world will be scheduled throughout both Saturday and Sunday – this format was used in 2020 and is being expanded this year. The conference will be free and conducted on Zoom.

What sorts of specters haunt the postcolonial realm? How can we conceive of hauntologies that enable us to effectively listen to postcolonial specters? Derrida defines hauntology as a way in which we can learn to acknowledge those things about us or around us that we have forgotten how to notice. He emphasizes that by acknowledging specters, hauntology performs a gesture of “positive conjuration” in which specters are raised to be listened to and not in order to be exorcised. Acting as a disruption to western notions of space and time, specters function as transformative mediums of postcolonial recovery by making space for the co-existence of the past within the present and acknowledging the existence of alternative histories.