It has been around 40 years since Vito Russo wrote the pioneering book The Celluloid Closet (1981) that catalogued the long painful history of gay representation in Hollywood film. The Celluloid Closet was produced during the AIDS epidemic and was one of many texts that drew attention to the lack of gay representation both before the 1980s and catalogued the changes that were occurring in gay media representation at the time. Lesbian representation has been historically represented by invisibility though was also impacted by the change in representation that the AIDS epidemic started. Gay male representation was always problematic while lesbians were invisible and heavily affected by the stigma of AIDS at this time.

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a session at the annual American Literature Association Conference, to be held in Boston, May 25-28. We are interested in abstracts that examine the influence of Charles Olson and/or other Black Mountain Poets on poetic practices and their developments up to the present. A variety of poets took up the innovative practices of figures like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, and others associated with Black Mountain. How have the practices of this fundamentally important school of poetics been extended, transformed, and/or resisted by other poets?

International Conference: “Infrastructures of Racism and the Contours of Black Vitality and Resistance.”

University of Torino (Italy), 23-25 March 2023

Call for Papers:

Margaret Fuller:  Westward to the Lakes, Eastward to Europe

The term “gaslighting” has reentered the popular lexicon with a vengeance in recent years, appearing in countless news stories and opinion pieces on the subjects of sex, race, politics, medicine, and emotional abuse. It refers to “the experience of having your reality repeatedly challenged by someone who holds more power than you do,” as one Washington Postcolumn recently articulated it. Such pieces often note that the term is drawn from a specific twentieth-century source text: George Cukor’s 1944 film Gaslight, based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play of the same name, which tells the story of a sadistic husband actively working to make his wife believe she is losing her mind.

We are excited to announce that submissions for the GCLR graduate conference LANDSCAPE & GARDEN IN ART, LITERATURE, AND FILM are now open. The graduate conference will be held in person at UCSB on Saturday, May 27, 2023. 

We are currently accepting proposals from graduate students, postdoctoral, and emergent scholars from UCSB and other institutions who are interested in giving a 20-minute paper. Please send a title and abstract to gclr@complit.ucsb.edu with the subject line "Landscape & Garden" by March 3, 2022.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Projecting the Past and Recalling the Future: Orienting the Self in Time

15th annual Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference

The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

April 7-8, 2023

Keynote lecture to be delivered by: Dr. Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Denison University

Call for Applications: Colby Book Nominations

The Robert and Vineta Colby Prize is intended to honor original book-length scholarship about Victorian periodicals and newspapers, of the kind that Robert and Vineta Colby themselves produced during their careers. The annual prize is awarded to a book published during the preceding year that most advances our understanding of the nineteenth-century British press.

See https://rs4vp.org/awards/colby-prize/ for more details. 

Call For Submissions – Creative Collection - Fears and Phobias – Sunderland Creative Press (University of Sunderland)

Tip-tap on your window, a nightmare comes to taunt you. It starts slowly, softly, building intensity through the dead of night. A thunderbolt of fright strikes through you; you tremble under the covers alone in the dark with creatures of the night, the perpetrators of your restless, anxiety-ridden slumber. Are you brave enough to explore fear a little closer? If you are, then we want to hear about which monsters lurk in your closet, and even the ones that hide under your bed and inside your head. 

As Russia began its invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, we saw a massive outpouring of
support and statements of solidarity from different corners of the globe. This news brought
conflict to the fore of white, US- and Euro-centric consciousness in a way that Palestine,
Kashmir, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Armenia had failed to do. This impulse to
selectively engage and empathize invites a careful consideration of which conflicts find space
and articulation in particular discourses and, perhaps more importantly, which do not. We invite
you to think with us on conflict - excavate the ways in which it challenges or reinforces

Empathy and the Teaching of Writing

The 26th Annual Summer Conference of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

of the National Council of Teachers of English

YMCA of the Rockies, Estes Park, CO, June 15-18, 2023

“If we see each other in each other’s eyes…the walls of Jericho can come tumbling down!” 

--Barack Obama

“Politics is commonly viewed as the practice of power or the embodiment of collective wills and interests and the enactment of collective ideas.”

“The syntagma ‘politics of literature’ means that literature ‘does’ politics as literature…”

-Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Literature” (2010)

You’ll find the full CFP below, but there are a few updates and details worth noting

• Submissions will now be accepted on a rolling basis with a submission cutoff date of January 15 2023.
• We still welcome undergraduate submissions for a poster session of student work
• To ensure an accessible conference experience, the conference will accept digital/hybrid paper presentations, which will be shared with the live audience of in-person attendees. Plenary events will be livestream for access by registered attendees.

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Call For Papers

2023 Steinbeck Conference: “Reading, Teaching, and Translating Steinbeck”

March 22-24, 2023     

San José State University, San José CA

Date: September 7-8-9, 2023

Conference venue: Université de La Réunion (La Réunion, France)

Conveners: Sonja Malzner (University of Luxembourg), Corinne Duboin and Frédéric Garan (University of Réunion Island)

This conference is held within the framework of a research project, “Popkult60” (Transnational popular culture - Europe in the 'long' 1960s), which involves three European universities: University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg), University of Saarbrücken (Germany), University of Jena (Germany). The event is organized in partnership with the Observatory of Indian Ocean Societies (OSOI) at the University of Réunion Island (Réunion, France).