History is frequently at the heart of how people view themselves and others in modern culture. The construction of the self in political, social, religious, and other spheres often exhibits an “instrumental” use of history in Nietzsche’s terms (a category also taken up by others, notably Foucault, Trouillot, and, more recently, implicitly in Priya Satia in Time’s Monster). The past is not simply a narrative of meaning connecting causality, leading from former times to the present, but it is also a means of crafting and molding a particular moment. In other words, the present is in the past. Perceptions of history are finding footing in modern causes and are proving to be instrumental for predetermined ends. 

Devils and Justified Sinners

An online conference on 24th and 25th August 2024 to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

The conference is entirely online and is open to scholars and experts from around the world.

Date: June 19, 2024 

Location: online

The idea of “middle-ness” can suggest stability—the center of an object is less likely to break than its edges. It can also suggest the opposite: something in a state of change can be said to be in “the middle”—neither one thing nor another. Mythcon 53, located in the middle of the continental U.S., welcomes papers exploring the concept of “middle-ness” as it is worked out in fantasy, science fiction, and related genres. Paper topics can cover a wide range of possibilities, including but not limited to the following:

Dominant queer and trans studies frameworks still tend to see visibility as a ‘trap’. We invite 200-word abstracts for a special session to be proposed for the 2025 MLA convention that will offer a more complex picture, specifying and historicizing the changing meanings of visibility in queer and trans representation. Please send 200-word abstracts and short bio notes to Guy Davidson and Ben Nichols (guy@uow.edu.au, ben.nichols@manchester.ac.uk) by 18th March 2024.

This guaranteed panel brings the multitude of disabled characters in Dostoevsky's work -- including those with physical dis/abilities, chronic illnesses, emotional-cognitive differences, or the deaf, blind, or non-verbal -- into conversation with the growing fields of Disability Studies and Critical Medical Humanities within Slavic Studies. In light of the Presidential Theme of Visibility, we urge scholars to go beyond abstraction and metaphor, examining the political positions, socio-economic worldviews, and existential stakes that shaped how disability and the disabled were framed in Dostoevsky's oeuvre.

Dickens remains one of the most visible Anglophone authors, with his fiction adapted regularly for the stage and screen and frequently taught and discussed by scholars. His hypercanonicity has also inspired more diverse, ephemeral forms of engagement across a range of cultural contexts, from popular visual and material cultures, through to literary tourism and festivals, and on to the practices of collectors and fans in both analogue and online contexts. This session invites contributions that analyse an aspect or aspects of this vast and still relatively underexplored terrain.

Title: African Language, Literature, and Culture Since 1990: Exploring the Dynamic Role of AAVE

Abstract:

How are poets, novelists, filmmakers, and other artists reconfiguring the Western genre? How do 21st century Westerns challenge the genre's enduring exclusions and myths? What do indigenous, queer, feminist, Black, and Asian-American Westerns make visible?

Please send a 200-word proposals and brief bio

The MLA Language Change Forum is seeking papers that analyze any aspect of discourse and/or language change related to the rise of populism from any field or methodological approach, whether in the U.S. context or beyond. Please submit a 300-word abstract for consideration. 

 Conference Title: Modern Languages Association Annual Conference

Conference Dates: January 9-12, 2025

Conference Location: New Orleans, LA

Contact Information: Laura Francis, Cornell U (lrf62@cornell.edu)

CFP: Plants Beyond Borders

 Although they are the most abundant life form on earth, plants have received scant attention from ecocritics until recently. As allies in the rethinking of human exceptionalism and the limits of human conceptions of nation, race, sexuality, disability, and invasion, plants challenge us to reimagine our philosophical and material relationship to the beings which enable each breath we take.  

Call for Papers for Journal of Chinese Cinemas Special Issue

Hidden Luminaries: Obscure Actresses and Women Filmmakers in Chinese Film History

Guest Editors: David John Boyd (University of Glasgow) and Jessica Siu-yin Yeung (Lingnan University)

Associate Editor: Yiman Wang (University of California, Santa Cruz)

This issue will contribute to the field of Chinese women’s cinema, with studies on individual actresses and women filmmakers who have either faded from cultural or institutional memory, or who are significant in their own region but are under-studied in Anglophone scholarship.

Modernist Chicago: Richard Wright and Beyond (Modernist Studies Association Conference, Nov 7-10)

Deadline for Submissions: 12 PM PST, Friday, March 29, 2024

In the spirit of MSA 2024’s location in Chicago, this panel—centered around but not limited to Richard Wright—seeks work that engages the city’s modernist scene, broadly construed, through WWII: in literature (for example, Lawd Today!, Wright’s posthumously published experimental novel about Chicago, tensions and pollinations between realist and modernist aesthetics), sociology (the Chicago School, including Robert Park), blues music, journal culture and other radical politics, etc.

Call for papers MLA 2025Special session"Women in the Early History of Comics (1800s-1950s)"

How did women artists or women's magazines contribute to the formation of the medium known today as "comics"? This includes cartoons, comics, and other graphic narratives before the emergence of underground feminist comix. Please send 250-word abstracts and bio to camilagutierrez@uc.cl

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 15 March 2024

Camila Gutiérrez, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (camilagutierrez@uc.cl )