Looming ecological and economic catastrophe has lent urgency to calls for “concrete utopian” solutions to capitalism’s excesses and to global governments’ failure to constrain those excesses—or to constrain them in ways that are consistent with democratic principles and international solidarity.  In this issue, we would like to prioritize articles that address the humanities’ role(s) in articulating and implementing real solutions to the political and economic issues of the twenty-first century.  We are interested in articles that emphasize the constructive over the diagnostic.

Not so much thinking “with” or “through” contradiction as about contradictory thoughts and feelings, this ACLA 2023 seminar will explore unique expressions of ambivalence and confusion in contemporary literature, film, culture, and theory, broadly conceived. This seminar seeks to track ambivalence— that admixture of love and hate— as the unsteady affective baseline of the social field and all group formations, or of one’s relations with others. Following Lauren Berlant (among others), we want to examine ambivalence in a less negative or resolute sense and more in a way that recognizes its inevitability and pervasiveness. How does ambivalence manifest in contemporary literary, subjective, and political spheres?

The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for its annual Spring Academy on American Culture, Economics, Geography, History, Literature, Politics, and Religion to be held from March 20-24, 2023.

The HCA Spring Academy provides 20 international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and thoroughly discuss their Ph.D. projects. Additionally, it offers workshops held by visiting scholars.

Learning of Castiglione’s death in 1529, Charles V declared “one of the finest gentlemen in the world has just died.”
The Spanish emperor’s praise is evidence of the depth and scope of the influence of Il Cortegiano during the
sixteenth century, appearing in Spanish translation by Juan Boscán in 1534 and in an Elizabethan translation by
Thomas Hoby in 1561. Yet Castiglione’s Courtier—read at times as a book of manners, and other times as
representative of Renaissance ideals—continued to influence writers, poets, and literary critics well into the
seventeenth century and for long after. Whether interested in sprezzatura, the art of conversation, the persistence of

Call for Submissions to ROMARD: Research on Medieval and Renaissance Drama.

ROMARD is currently seeking submissions for publication in Volume 60. Anyone may submit original work to be considered for publication provided that they hold the authorized copyright for the work. ROMARD welcomes submissions of:

This edited volume examines how sexual violence and feminist interventions in South Asia and the Diaspora have been articulated in literature and popular culture in the context of and in opposition to the #MeToo Movement. The #MeToo has significantly impacted how we understand sexual harassment, rape, and gendered violence, especially in the US.  However, the movement was taken up only briefly by the media and entertainment industry in South Asia and the Diaspora.

In the rapid pivot to remote teaching at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many instructors turned to tools like Hypothes.is and Perusall that allow students to engage in social reading and annotation. These same tools are also built into many digital editions (like those in Literature in Context) and multimedia scholarly publishing platforms like Manifold and Scalar. The Digital Humanities Caucus calls for presentations on annotation in an eighteenth-century and/or contemporary context.

CFP: Routledge Companion to Cultural Text and the Nation

We invite prospective contributions for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Cultural Text and the Nation, an exciting new addition to the growing, dynamic book series. 

I am looking for papers for our  panel at  the Annual Convention of the Northeast  Modern Languages Assocation  (NEMLA) to be help at Niagra Falls, Buffalo, NY March 23-26, 2023.

Asia in popular media was predominantly represented as sexually conservative with heterosexual narratives culminating in marriage. The 21st century, however, witnessed a surge of queer depictions that challenged the dominance of the heteronormative. This panel invites papers exploring representations of non-normative sexualities and genders from media industries within Asia. We are seeking in-depth discussions about queer narratives in films – independent as well as mainstream, television programs, and webseries. How do these different media formats shape the queer? To what extent does censorship affect these depictions? What roles do studios/production houses play in crafting queer subjectivities? How is the queer embodied in these narratives?

In a memorable scene from Questlove’s award-winning documentary, Summer of Soul about the Harlem Cultural Festival (1969), singer Nina Simone performs “Backlash Blues,” a poem by her friend Langston Hughes. Five decades later, Beyonce performed a rousing version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” for her Homecoming tour in 2019. The poem, affectionately called the Black National Anthem, was originally written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900. Across these multiple decades, (and long before) African American musicians have invoked Black Literature, while African American writers have referenced Black music.

Where were you when you got an email from your institution in spring 2020 that you would have to move your courses online? How do you address trauma perpetrated against marginalized groups without further traumatizing your students?

Two years into our unprecedented new normal, this round table seeks a clearer understanding of what makes a classroom resilient in the face of unanticipated challenges. Internationally, we face inequity regarding healthcare access, racial disparity in law enforcement and economic standing, and culture wars waged against marginalized identity groups, among an unfortunately long list of other inequities.

In the documentary This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein describes the limits of depicting climate change as the inevitable result of human nature driven by greed and competition. As Klein argues, this story of climate change diminishes social agency, promotes powerlessness, and displaces solutions beyond the repetition of the status quo. Several years later, capitalist realism and apocalypse remain primary modes through which climate futures are envisioned in news media, film, television, and literature.

Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC) will be holding its 43rd Annual Meeting at the Minneapolis Marriott City Center in Minneapolis, MN on March 9 through 12, 2023!

We are seeking proposals for paper and co-paper presentations, round-table discussions, organized panels, workshops, performances, and hybrid presentations that can be linked to the theme IMPOSSIBLE THEATRE broadly construed, from the perspective of historians, scholars, teachers, producers, directors, actors, playwrights, choreographers, movement specialists, scenographers, technicians, designers, dramaturgs, stage managers, and spectators. 

Proposals might engage: