2024 Advanced Writing Symposium
Uncharted Territories: Genre, Audience & Innovation in Advanced Writing Contexts

University of Southern California

Event Date: February 2, 2024
Event Location: Online

The USC Writing Program’s Upper Division Curriculum Committee welcomes proposals for
“Uncharted Territories: Genre, Audience and Innovation in Advanced Writing Contexts.”

Sophia A. McClennen and Joseph R. Slaughter in “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms” warn: “Human rights are under threat everywhere, especially when the language of human rights is used to justify their violation” (Comparative Literature Studies 2009). They notice that through double-speak the states exercise violence to advance their jingoist agenda in the name of protecting the rights of the children and women, as George Bush did while invading Afghanistan in 2001.

In keeping with NeMLA's theme on “Surplus,” this roundtable will interrogate the works of Richard Wright and Ann Petry and how they have been interpreted as “excessive.”   It seeks to examine how their work has been understood as excessively: masculine, feminist, violent, Communist, leftist, assimilationist, naturalist, realist, etc.  This roundtable seeks to look at two major African American authors of the twentieth century whose boundary pushing were seen as "excessive."

Abstract:

International conference: Streaming in the Global South

Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University, Lithuania

 Vilnius, 18-20 January 2024

The Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies (Vilnius University) and the Centre for Creative and Cultural Practice (University of East London) invite proposals for conference papers on streaming and video online distribution in the Global South.

What can be said about epic today? Although M.M. Bakhtin famously declared the impossibility of epic in a modern, polyphonic world in 1941, the category has remained a dynamic source of artistic and critical interest. The works considered in studies like Franco Moretti’s Modern Epic (1994), Sneharika Roy’s Postcolonial Epic (2018), or Václav Paris’s Evolutions of Modernist Epic (2021) re-evaluate epic as a multifarious category capable of shedding light on the global, postcolonial, and postmodern condition of contemporary literature—either as a site of resistance or as a form of cultural domination. Yet even in its new, polyphonic forms, the idea of epic is rarely severed completely from its classical roots.

We would like to invite proposals for chapters for a forthcoming edited collection on animals, fashion, and colonialism. Our project investigates the way that colonialism was inscribed on the female body through animal fashions in the long nineteenth century and beyond. Contributions are welcome from a wide variety of fields, with interdisciplinary approaches preferred. 

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:  

This session highlights interdisciplinary scholarship on contemporary Black satire from roughly 2013 to the present, such as how the TV series Atlanta and related texts serve as microcosmic exemplars for Black satirists’ commentary on life in the United States after Obama.

Abstracts are encouraged to take an interdisciplinary approach to their engagement with literary and cultural works that speak to the state of Black satire and American society since 2011. Please submit a 200-300 word abstract and a brief bio (50-100 words) by October 15, 2023. All abstracts must be submitted via https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20616.

As the concept of plasticity has travelled across feminist science studies and new materialisms to Black, queer, and trans studies, its meaning has itself become unstable—or plastic. Jules Gill-Peterson and Kyla Schuller offer an appropriately plastic definition: “plasticity refers to the capacity of a given body or system to generate new form” (1). Many feminist and queer theorists have sung the praises of plasticity, which promises to destabilize fixed forms of power relations, across the registers of gender/sex, race, and (neuro)biology (from Catherine Malabou to Karen Barad to Judith Butler).

Dear Colleagues,

We have the pleasure to invite you to submit articles for our next issue, due March-April 2024. We receive papers on Literature (not that of ancient Greece or Rome), Media Studies, Film Studies, Visual and Performative Arts, and Teaching (Language and Literature). Papers in said areas need to focus on the following themes: Nationalism/ Post-nationalism, Colonialism/Postcolonialism/Decolonization, Race, Gender Studies, Ethnicity, and Identity.

We are indexed by: CEEOL, Ulrichsweb, MLA Directory of Periodicals, DOAJ, EBSCO, ERIH PLUS, and SCOPUS. And visible through WorldCat. 

Volume 1, Issue 2

[The Apollonian is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that is published bi-annually.]

The Apollonian: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies seeks submissions for its sophomore issue (since its revival). The journal welcomes Academic Essays (within 5000 words), Short Essays (within 1500 words) and Book Reviews (within 2000 words). For the forthcoming issue, the submissions can be interdisciplinary, but must fall within the broader definition of humanities (and this also includes areas such as STEM and medical humanities, new media, visual cultures etc).

Book Reviews: 

"Theater and Memory" Panel

Contact email : imacdona@bowdoin.edu

Comparative Drama Conference

Orlando, FL, April 4-6, 2024

Deadline: October 12, 2023

This panel welcomes papers about "Theater and Memory" broadly construed. Actors struggle to remember their lines. Playwrights write against forgetting. Audience members selectively recall their favorite moments from performances. Memory is imperfect and flawed yet is also an essential part of the theater and the practices that surround it.

Topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

"Beyond the Capitals of Decadence" - Seminar @ ACLA 2024 

Organizers: Florian Zappe &James Dowthwaite

CFP ACLA2024: Seminar "The Evolution of Interactivity in Storytelling"

American Comparative Literature Association

Montreal, Canada, March 14-17, 2024

Abstract deadline: September 30, 2023

The ongoing evolution of interactivity in novels, films, games, and digital media forms a continual dialogue between human creativity and technological innovation.  Interactivity has long been a cornerstone in storytelling, engendering a dynamic relationship between creators, writers, readers, players, and interactors.

Roopika Risam in her New Digital Worlds (2019) argues that the postcolonial digital pedagogy aims to show “how print culture has played a role in constructing a world that privileges the stories, voices, and values of the Global North and how digital cultures in the twenty-first century reproduce these practices, contributing to the epistemological marginalization of the Global South” (89).