2025 ACIS-BCPS CONFERENCE
FEBRUARY 23-26, 2025 | DESOTO SAVANNAH, SAVANNAH, GA

The Program Committee for the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) and the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference (BCPS) cordially invites the electronic submission of proposals for papers, panels, and other relevant presentations.

The current surge of graphic novels in French, from Marjane Satrapi's oft-celebrated Persepolis to Jessica Oublié's lesser-known-yet-prize-winning Péyi An Nou, signifies a shift in priorities for Francophone storytellers. Graphic novels create meaning through the interplay of text and image; they privilege non-linear storytelling and thinking; and they prioritize accessibility over erudition. As a marginalized genre, graphic novels are a welcome home for those writing and illustrating from the margins of society. In a graphic novel, what we see is never the full story; instead, we are constantly challenged into new modes of "seeing" and "reading" that question assumptions about the consumption of literature and art.

This conference, marking the 50th anniversary of the formation of the African Literature Association (ALA), explores the ways in which African writers reconceive movement and place. Often, narratives about Africans on the move, particularly migrant Africans, reflect a tension between motion and stasis. Such tensions highlight the often-unsettling narrative transitions that characterize recent poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction from Africa and the diaspora. While narratives like NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names depict the exigencies of forced removal, others, like Fatou Diome’s Belly of the Atlantic describe identities and situations in flux.

Although writers like Sappho and Shakespeare died hundreds of years ago, the works they left behind are still vibrantly alive. When we read them, we recognize something fundamental about ourselves. In this roundtable, literature scholars, creative essayists, and poets reflect on deeply personal encounters with “old” books, texts, and images from the pre-Industrial past. Covering a range of topics—Shakespeare and divorce, Dante and gender, Hippocrates and the modern health-care system, St. Agatha and embodiment, studying the Middle Ages while Black—these essays show how conversations with the past continues to animate our twenty-first century lives.

We are especially interested in essays that engage the 17th and 18th centuries.

As today we see Western countries enacting various immigration laws and borders are being mined to prevent “intruders” from accessing those countries. Faced with (in)security in sub-Saharan Africa the African woman has become that monster of abjection residing in that marginal geography, dwelling in the gates of difference in unfamiliar spaces. The African woman faced with (im)migration goes through a strong feeling of revulsion, fear, or aversion, she is treated as something that is a threat to one's boundaries and undermines one's sense of identity and security, exemplifying Kristeva’s idea of abjection.

HJEAS Books:  Contemporary maternal subjectivities on the page and on the screen - Call for Papers for an edited collection 

James Baldwin Review Special Issue CFP: “The Standards Which Have Almost Killed You Are Really Mercantile Standards”: Race, Class, Baldwin

In 21st-century Ireland, women have experienced several (r)evolutions in their political rights that have, in turn, shaped the imagination of the nation. Irish abortion law faced a major public challenge with the 2012 death of Savita Halappanavar after she was denied an abortion while suffering a septic miscarriage; in 2018, lawmakers passed a law that allows abortion up to week 12 of pregnancy, a small victory in a nation where abortion under any circumstances beyond saving the life of the mother was forbidden.

The Arkansas Philological Association invites papers/presentations for its 51st annual conference. The conference will take place Nov. 8-9, 2024, at the University of Arkansas - Fort Smith.

We welcome faculty, graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and independent scholars from a wide range of disciplines to submit proposals of no more than 200 words for 15- to 20-minute presentations on topics related to language(s), literature, theoretical and cultural analysis, creative works, and pedagogical approaches. Papers addressing any aspect of literary and cultural studies are welcome, but we particularly encourage proposals for talks (or panels) on the APA 2024 conference topic of food and culture.

56th NeMLA ConventionPhiladelphia, PA |  March 6-9th, 2025

All submissions must be made through NeMLA's submission portal: View Session (cfplist.com)

Hip hop began in the Bronx, NY, in the early 1970s, but the musical genre and cultural movement build from a rich history of Black American traditions, experience, and epistemology. This session seeks short presentations that will prompt a roundtable discussion about how hip hop has influenced and been influenced by American (r)evolution.
Some might argue that hip hop was and is a cultural (r)evolution for many reasons, including:

Beyond the Capitals of Decadence

Title: Beyond Backwardness: Revisiting Rural Spaces as Sites of Resistance, Renewal, and Radical Potential Organizers: David Delgado López (Visiting Assistant Professor, Carleton College), Kelly Ferguson (Assistant Professor, Miami University), Brittany Frodge (Lecturer, Ohio State University) Description: Due to varied complex historical processes such as industrialization, urbanization, and colonization, the rural has often been articulated in literature and other cultural products as an underdeveloped space tied to the past that can only progress through civilizing acts of modernization; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo or Civilization and Barbarism (Argentina, 1845), Camilo José

Theatre Topics Call for Paragraphs on the Pedagogy of the Now

Theatre Topics invites submissions of short reflective descriptions of activities, exercises, assignments, and scripts currently used in the theatre and performance classroom for a March 2025 special section on the pedagogy of the now. We seek paragraphs of no more than 300 words about how theatre educators are meeting the needs of today’s students.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Georgetown University Law Center, Stanford Law School, UCLA School of Law, the University of

Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California Center for Law, History, and Culture

invite submissions for the 24th meeting of the Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars,

to be held at Stanford University on June 9-10, 2025.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

The workshop is open to untenured professors, advanced graduate students, post-doctoral

scholars, and independent scholars working in law and the humanities. In addition to drawing

from numerous humanistic fields, including Black and Indigenous studies, history, literature,