Proposals are invited for Some Circumstance of the Text, a planned collection of essays to memorialize and celebrate William Proctor Williams (1939–2023), whose more than half-century of scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and reviewing has made a profound and lasting contribution to the fields of early modern English literature and drama, Shakespeare studies, textual criticism, bibliography, and book history.

Proposed essays should draw upon, build upon, or engage with William’s ideas across any of the subjects in which he worked, including but not limited to:

“Reading for Wellness”

Taking inspiration from the in/of that joins Health and Humanities in this year’s conference theme, this panel seeks papers that broadly consider the relationship between the short story form and wellbeing.   

Individual and Collective Wellbeing

Claims made for the humanness of the short story form – its capacity to capture, condense, and convey essential elements if not the Truth of human experience – take on added urgency in an age increasingly characterized as inhuman.   

Submissions to this panel, then, might

ALA Symposium “American Poetry”American Poetry

November 7-9, 2024
Drury Plaza Hotel in Santa Fe
828 Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, NM 87501

Conference Director:
Richard Flynn, Georgia Southern University

Keynote Speaker:
Karen L. Kilcup
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Conference Fee: $175

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual is the leading venue for the critical reassessment of Eliot’s life and work in light of the ongoing publication of his letters, critical volumes of his complete prose, the 2015 edition of his complete poems, and the forthcoming critical edition of his plays.

All critical approaches are welcome, as are essays pertaining to any aspect of Eliot’s work as a poet, critic, playwright, editor, foremost exemplar of modernism, or his influence on twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture.

As historian Kim E. Nielson argues in A Disability History of the United States, the health of the body became metaphorically linked to the health of the nation in the early national period. The nationalist rhetoric of the healthy body politic led to the marginalization of individuals seen as occupying “deficient” or dependent bodies.  This panel seeks to explore this dynamic from the perspective of those excluded by this rhetoric. Papers focused on artists, writers, and other art producers who experienced disability during the era are welcome. How did these figures respond to the nationalist mythos, and how did they envision themselves with respect to the body politic?

Black Feminist Excesses

(MLA 2025 Proposed Working Group)

This working group aims to theorize excess, desire and unbridled being in Black feminist and womanist studies. How does Black feminism and womanism engage disparate, wayward, or fringe forms of identity, embodiment, materiality, affect and culture?  How can concepts like ‘indulgence’ or ‘aspiration’ be considered or troubled among current theoretical frameworks? What do you think is on the horizon for Black feminist and womanist thought in moving beyond the postfeminist moment?

City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, 5 December 2024

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, 6 December 2024

This international, interdisciplinary conference aims to uncover emergent frameworks and methods for the interpretation and analysis of literary, filmic, and cultural texts relating to the profound transformation of cities around the world across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

The Global Novel Research Project’s final conference gathers scholars pursuing research on the contemporary novel from a global perspective, from any literary and linguistic tradition. The conference topic aligns with the project's objective. We are interested in a new, more integrated, and decentralized perspective in the study of the emergent genre of the global novel, defined as a narrative form that aspires to represent and think about the contemporary world from a global perspective. This new approach will help us better understand how the global novel contributes, discusses and builds global discourses through specific exploratory poetics. Simultaneously, it will help map the uneven circulation of these works within the literary space.

Rolling Call for Contributions

We have a rolling call for contributions and are happy to accept them at any time. However, if you would like your piece to be considered for publication in the next volume, please submit your piece for peer review by May 30, 2024.

Renascence: Essays on Literature and Ethics, Spirituality, and Religion continues to publish scholarship on a wide range of time periods, traditions, and perspectives. While welcoming essays on our longstanding concerns such as T S Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Graham Greene, we call attention to our recent interventions into contemporary writers like Marilynne Robinson and Carolyn Forché, into Dante studies and Shakespeare studies, and into non-Western areas of inquiry.

Celebrating the tercentenary of Allan Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd, seeking papers on pastoral(ism) and development, improvement, colonialism, or class in Scotland across the long durée. Please submit a 250-word abstract and 100-word bio.

Extebded Deadline for submissions: Monday, 25 March 2024

East Asian pop culture has been increasingly in vogue across the globe since the 1990s, and the Hallyu wave of the early 2000s has further propelled the momentum of this movement. With the growth of this incredible cultural enterprise arose the global fandoms, paving way to the birth of novel fan cultures and traditions and, furthermore, to a global tribe of its own. This presence, which is felt internationally, calls for a space of parrhesia, of breaching certain boundaries, of destroying normative assumptions, of suggesting deviancies, of reclaiming spaces, and so on. The BTS revolution exemplifies this changing geo-cultural flux rather well.

This panel interrogates the formal and aesthetic evasions of Black texts and authors in response to the overt and obfuscated grammars of white supremacy. We welcome 250-word abstracts that explore the ways that Black writers enable or restrict the visibility of white supremacist and/or neoliberal grammars of language and grammars of living. Hidden in the etymology of the word grammar is “glamour,” suggesting the enchantment of an optical illusion. And yet, grammar is the architecture that unconsciously structures language and thought, creating the very conventions and norms that dictate how the world should be.

The Journal of the Wooden O (JWO) is a peer-reviewed academic publication focusing on Shakespeare studies. The editors invite papers on topics related to Shakespeare, including Shakespearean texts, Shakespeare in performance, the adaptation of Shakespeare works (film, fiction, and visual and performing arts), Elizabethan and Jacobean culture and history, and Shakespeare’s contemporaries.