In Song of the Shank, Jeff Allen explores his characters’ sense of “placelessness...empty distance...like retracted thoughts, half-told secrets.”  What defines a writer’s underlying map of “urban space?”  Urbanity as a focus offers history, but how do cities’ secret histories, deep ecologies, and furtive sounds offer a shape to urban narrative?  What memory resides in cities’ erased/lingering boundaries, vacant lots, and disintegrating concrete?  This roundtable explores how writers and other artists have utilized particular cities’ cores, edges, and points of transit as means to rethink the shape, shift, and stasis of urban space.  We welcome papers on the full range of literary forms, but also welcome examinations of visual and sonic expression

call for proposals for a special issue of Transnational Screens

“From Yesterday’s Margins to Today’s: Towards Decolonizing Curricula, Pedagogy, and Research in Transnational Screen Media”

edited by Sheetal Majithia and Dale Hudson

It’s a statistic we hear often: America incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation. Yet, most Americans can go about their daily lives without thinking about their physical proximity to prisons or the people locked within. With few exceptions, prisons are built in rural, remote areas, set back from main highways and not visible from shopping centers, restaurants, and housing developments. Likewise, America’s political landscape works hard to obfuscate the realities of life locked up, reducing discourses of mass incarceration to shocking statistics and incomprehensible numbers. 

Sponsors: Brescia University College, University of Winnipeg, Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review, and Sequential: Canadian Independent Comic Book Magazine

Organizing Committee: Dominick Grace (Brescia University College), Candida Rifkind (University of Winnipeg), Zachary Rondinelli (Brock University), Meaghan Scanlon (Library and Archives Canada), Ivan Kocmarek (Independent Researcher)

Call for Participants (10 minutes + Q&A Session)

Comics studies has been an established field long enough now to have consistent theoretical touchstones: Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen, and a handful of others. But much contemporary work on comics continues to rely on the same theoretical frameworks, returning to Understanding Comics over and over again. This session invites panelists to speculate on new directions for formal comics theory, leaving behind individual texts and close readings to ask for innovations our theories of comics as a medium. Of course, because of the abbreviated nature of conference papers, it will be impossible to put forward a fully-formed, all-encompassing new theory.

Expressions of interest are sought for contributions to a planned 2022 special issue of Australian Feminist Studies (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) devoted to the topic of ‘The Home’.  We anticipate publishing wide-ranging sets of ideas that capture the current and emerging challenges and opportunities for feminist thinkers examining aspects of the home and housing more generally.

We welcome contributions from scholars in any discipline, including architecture, built environment, design, sociology, social policy, geography, politics, anthropology, cultural studies, film, and literature.

This roundtable is part of the 53rd annual convention of the NeMLA, held March 10-13, 2022, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Care With(out) and Against the State 

The Year Without a Summer in Europe was among the reasons that inspired some nineteenth-century British writers to write novels and poems reflecting on the event and its effects on human relations. Works like Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Lord Byron’s Darkness are among the examples that describe the feelings resulting from such an event, especially in Shelley’s work, in which many racial and political issues arise from such a crisis. How human beings care about each other in crises and what dilemmas result from such events are the focus of this session, as these issues are closely related to the most recent COVID-19 crisis.

Latin American Digitalities

Main Editors: Patrícia Anzini & Eduardo Prado Cardoso

(Deadline Extended to June 30th, 2021)

South Atlantic Review Special Issue: “Post-Normative?”

Guest Editors: Horacio Sierra, Bowie State University & Austin Svedjan, Louisiana State University

CONFERENCE CALL

MELOW 2021

THE 21st INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF

MELOW (THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF THE MULTI-ETHNIC LITERATURES OF THE WORLD)

to be organized by

SHOOLINI UNIVERSITY, SOLAN, HP, INDIA, https://shooliniuniversity.com/ 

FROM 12 TO 14 NOVEMBER 2021

CONFERENCE THEME: ILLNESS, HEALING, AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION

Dark academia is a recently emerging term of phrase describing not only an aesthetic within popular culture but also a type of genre involving an academic background, elements of the gothic, and the spectacular. Like the speculative supergenre, dark academia often borrows freely from other literary and cultural categorizations, in the way of crime fiction, classical Greek & British mythologies, artistic aesthetics, paranormalcy, romance, villainy, stoicism, and posthumanism. Oftentimes within dark academia, the Other represents a romanticized villain and/or monster with whom the reader and reviewer empathizes with. Through this romanticization, we often find that nostalgia for a colonial history takes centerstage.

 The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review invites submissions for a special issue on Hawthorne and Religion, with guest editor Jonathan A. Cook.  Over the course of his career, Hawthorne earned a reputation as the nation’s leading imaginative interpreter of New England Puritanism and its nineteenth-century cultural legacy, but the exact nature of his religious predilections remains open to debate.  Was he a bona fide Christian?  If he was, why didn’t he go to church?  What credence did Hawthorne give to his ancestral Calvinism?  What impact did his wife’s Unitarianism have on him?  Did Hawthorne have a well-kept “secret” that influenced his depiction of repressed guilt?  What did Hawthorne think of contemporary evangelical Protestantism, and of the nation’

Call for Papers 

Routledge Volume

Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics

Heike Härting and Heather Meek (eds.)