CFP: Special Issue: MAST Journal
TOTAL SCREEN: Why Jean Baudrillard, Once Again? 

Guest editors:
Katharina Niemeyer (University of Québec in Montréal)
Magali Uhl (University of Québec in Montréal)

Extended deadline for full submissions: 15th November 2020 (for publication in May 2021).

This panel is a part of the 52nd Annual Convention of the The Northeast Modern Language Association. The conference will take place at the Marriott Hotel Downtown in Philadelphia, PA, with the support of the University of Pennsylvania, the local host institution.

The deadline for abstracts is September 30, 2020.

We invite participants to explore some of the ways in which Afro-Latin American experience was narrated by writers, scientists, and politicians in Latin America 19th to mid-20th century and beyond. We encourage participants to address Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Lusophone contexts of the said regions and the ties between these.

Evil Children: Children and Evil
2nd Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference

Sunday 18th April 2021 - Monday 19th April 2021
Vienna, Austria

The idea of the child as innocent, as pure, the ‘little angel’ in need of protection from the harsh realities of life and the corrupting influences of the world around us has come to dominate our thinking, language, values, social policies and educational philosophies. Children are seen as ‘little people’, ‘blank slates’, works in progress who are loved, nurtured and guided as they grow to become mature, rational and responsible adults.

True Crime
An Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference

Sunday 18th April 2021 - Monday 19th April 2021
Vienna, Austria

Rescheduled from 2020 due to COVID-19.

This panel will focus on uncovering the ideas and philosophies proposed by 17th- and 18th-century French writers to criticize, change, or improve their world. 17th- and 18th-century authors will include female and male philosophers, moralists, essayists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. The method of analysis is open.

Submit abstracts (300 words maximum) by September 30, 2020, to Session ID # 18514

Abstracts must be submitted through NeMLA's website: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18514

Utopia on the Tabletop: CfS

“Quite the contrary, Skepticus. I believe that Utopia is intelligible, and I believe that game playing is what makes Utopia intelligible.”

— Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Play, and Utopia

We invite abstracts of 200-500 words on the theme of utopia and tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). Please also include either a 50-300 word bio, or a CV, or a link to your website. Send abstracts to j.c.walton@sussex.ac.uk by 1 February 2021 with “Submission” in the subject line. Chapters of 5,000-8,000 words will be due 1 September 2021.

Bengali author Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-Westerner to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was a prolific writer in diverse literary genres, including both long and short-form fiction. This panel explores similarities and differences between Tagore’s short stories on the one hand, and his novellas and novels, on the other. Did the Bengali author tend to treat specific themes at length while reserving other motifs for his shorter fiction? Concerning setting, characterization, and plot trajectory, what are similarities and differences between Tagore’s shorter tales and his novels? Are there differences between Tagore’s stories and his novels regarding their accessibility and currency in the present day and for transnational audiences?

In a time of unrest and division, the WEJ is interested in strengthening connections. While the WEJ remains focused on student writing in high school, community college, and university environments, it is also crucial for scholars to consider the transition from secondary to post-secondary education and how instructors at each level can work with students who are developing writing expertise. To that end, the WEJ would like to welcome submissions on a variety of related topics:

Re-reading Adrienne Rich in the quickly shifting crises of the year 2020, one senses the renewed urgency of her ethico-political project as a citizen poet seeking to “believe the fever can break, the sick body politic come back to life” (A Human Eye 98). Throughout her poetic career Rich challenged the perceived disconnect between poetry and material social good, and while her early and mid-career poems may be the most frequently anthologized, the poetry and prose she published in the second half of her six-decade project continues an extraordinary trajectory of expanding solidarities and poetic technique.

The 52nd NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) Convention (Philadelphia, PA) is now going to be held on a hybrid/virtual platform between March 11 and 14, 2021. This means you can present your papers virtually from anywhere in the world without having to travel to Philadelphia, PA. We now hope to hear more from scholars and students living outside of the US. Please consider sending your abstracts to our panels by September 30! See this link for more instructions: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers/submit.html

 Reposting my own panel description here for anyone interested in global modernism and print networks:

Music and Nationalism
3rd Global Interdisciplinary Conference

Friday 16th April 2021 - Saturday 17th April 2021
Vienna, Austria

Music is commonly regarded as a universal language, and yet it is also through music that the fiercest of nationalistic sentiments and inspirations for protest and rebellion have been expressed.

Evil - Traditions and Transformations
3rd Global Interdisciplinary Conference

Friday 16th April 2021 - Saturday 17th April 2021
Vienna, Austria

Both essentialist and contextual notions of Evil – the things we do as well as the things that happen to us – continue to be a stubborn and destructive presence in our lives. But what is “Evil”? What are the moral, political, philosophical, pragmatic, individual and global implications of calling something or someone “Evil”? What impact does that have on personal and social identities? How are concepts of Evil mediated and represented through different cultural forms? If ascribed too loosely is the intended effect of the term (whatever that may be) diminished?

In the mid-twentieth century, Kenneth Burke's massive body of work on the "new rhetoric" was widely considered to be a watershed for the rhetorical tradition and its interlocutors. Routing classical and new rhetorical concepts through contemporary understandings of the unconscious, ideology, media, discourse, literature, politics, ecology, and economics, Burke rendered "mere rhetoric" relevant to the concerns of modernity.  In 2020, his trailblazing approaches to terms such as identification, orientation, attitude, hierarchy, interpretation, occupation, action, trope, etc.