Call for Papers

Democratizing Knowledge: Examining Archives in the Post-custodial Era 
November 7th, 2020 at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey

Can We Be More Than the Middle Ages? Medievalism Studies and Medieval Studies (Roundtable)

52nd Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association

Marriott Downtown Philadelphia, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 11-14 March 2021

Paper abstracts are due by 30 September 2020

Session organized by Michael A. Torregrossa and Carl B. Sell and sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture.

This panel aims to explore the machinic metaphor in the Italian and European literary, cinematographic, and philosophical panorama of the 20th century. Since the Industrial Revolution, machines have established themselves as a crucial, pervasive, and unavoidable presence of individual life and collective existence. The disturbing and fascinating vitality of the machine has shaped all social, political, and economic relationships. Even the literary, cinematographic, and philosophical space was crossed by the new myth of the machine and met its complexity: it refused or exalted it, let itself be inspired by it, analyzed its profound meaning.

CALL FOR PAPERS

for a topical issue of Open Theology

Phenomenology of Religious Experience V: (Ir)Rationality and Religiosity During Pandemics

Edited by:
Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (UC Davis and Graduate Theological Union)
Jason Alvis (University of Vienna)
Michael Staudigl (University of Vienna)

DESCRIPTION

A combination of global transformations within cultural and political perspectives have germinated fresh theoretical approaches to all fields of inquiry. Moving into the third decade of the Twenty-First Century, how does a controversial author like Henry Miller (1891-1980) fit into our current conversations? We could ask some of the following questions: in the era of #MeToo does Miller’s literature and personae alter significantly? How might we approach Miller’s extensive published and/or archival correspondences in terms of Life Writing or the Archival Turn? Miller received copious amounts of fan mail over numerous decades; how do fan mail studies help reveal Miller’s impact on American (and global) readers?

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Julia Ward Howe’s Saturday Morning Club, a one-day symposium on Howe’s legacy will be held at Boston University’s College of General Studies on Saturday, June 12, 2021.  Professor Megan Marshall will deliver a keynote address Friday evening, June 11, 2021 at a dinner to open the festivities.  Topics on any aspect of Julia Ward Howe’s legacy may include, but are not limited to: Social Reform in 19th Century Feminism; Women Writing Hymns and Poetry; Transatlantic Social Movements; Gender and Identity; Literary Celebrity; Women’s Suffrage; Howe and Material Culture in the Gilded Age; Howe, Abolition, and Race; Ladies’ Clubs, Then and Now; The Domestic Sphere; 19th Century Women’s Travel Writing; Writing Women’s Biography

Dream-Chasers: Children and Success in Asia 

Gender and Death in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernity 

Gender and Death in the late middle ages and early modernity

Call for proposals on how the category of gender survived, disappeared or was transformed in contact with death in the late medieval and early modern period.

Resources for American Literary Study, the leading journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship in American literature, is inviting submissions for upcoming issues. Covering all periods of American literature, RALS welcomes both traditional and digital approaches to archival and bibliographical analysis. 

Founded in 1971, RALS remains the only major scholarly periodical of its kind. Each issue includes, in addition to archival and bibliographical research, related book reviews and a unique “Prospects” essay that identifies new directions in the study of major authors. Our editorial board consists of leading scholars from an array of fields and subfields in American literary study.

Growing up in Latin America is an experience that has been marked by constant negotiations with precarity, (post)coloniality and multiple forms of violence. Numerous literary and audiovisual productions have drawn attention to this issue, which has also elicited significant academic interest. In this edited volume, we invite critical examinations of 20th and 21stcenturies coming-of-age narratives and Bildungsroman dealing with bi-cultural or multi-cultural identities, picaresque and heterodox processes of learning, non hetero-normative sexualities, as well as other alternative processes of development and growth.

The question of cosmopolitanism has been crucial to the literatures of Latin America during the 20th and 21st centuries. At the turn of the past century modernistas and vanguardistas proposed innovative views of cultural cosmopolitanism that traced the geopolitical shifts of the continent. Later, as Magical Realism became a global phenomenon, this originally Latin American aesthetics would come to be celebrated as the literary language of the postcolonial world (Bhabha).

Recently, in an epic #Verzuz battle organized by producer Swizz Beatz and rapper-producer Timbaland, the Grammy-Award winning singers Erykah Badu and Jill Scott appeared on Instagram live. Therein Scott invoked Langston Hughes as an inspirational artist, pointing to the poet’s continued popularity in the twenty-first century, especially during #Covid19. For countless African Americans, the death tolls from the virus, inadequate health care, unemployment, and white supremacist bigotry epitomize Hughes’s notion of the dream deferred. Video footage released May 26, 2020, showed officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department kneeling on Floyd’s neck for at least seven minutes in broad daylight. Floyd died afterward.

This session proposes a re-examination of the undergraduate student writer's concept of agency during times of crisis. We aim to expand our critical understanding of what it means to teach students in a way that empowers, offers agency, and acknowledges the voice of the student during times of crisis, whether such crisis is a result of a global pandemic such as Covid-19, national issues such as police brutality, or the result of a personal struggle such as anxiety or loss and, thus, we welcome contributions that address agency, empowerment, and voice from a variety of academic perspectives.

Investigating the Detective Genre Across Cultures and Mediums

In the age of multi-platform streaming services, online gaming, and mass-market novels, the detective genre continues to be one of the most popular and successful narrative forms. The genre has cultivated an impressive intellectual half-life from its modern origins in the nineteenth century due to its ability to adapt to the needs of new cultures and mediums. From quiet English villages, to interactive space odysseys, to collaborative reimagining of World War II, the socio-cultural-temporal settings change, but what remains is the genre’s ability to smuggle cultural critiques into and through its narrative.