(Neo)Colonial Images and Literature: The Construction of the Other

Dança guerreira e religiosa dos Tupinambá, Jean-Baptiste Debret (1834)

We invite scholars to submit proposals for our upcoming conference, which will examine how colonial and neocolonial powers have influenced representations of non-Western countries and their peoples in literature, the arts, and the media. This event seeks to investigate how these representations have been instrumental in constructing negative stereotypes, enforcing cultural hierarchies, and sustaining hegemonic narratives that marginalise indigenous, local, and non-Western communities.

This panel explores how cultural genealogies—artistic, intellectual, political, and linguistic—are constructed, resisted, and reimagined across French and Francophone spaces. Far from being fixed or linear, inheritance often manifests through discontinuities, silences, and contested claims. Artists and thinkers engage with prior figures, movements, and traditions in ways that may reaffirm legacies, subvert them, or create entirely new configurations of belonging and dissent. Whether through homage, revision, irony, or deliberate omission, these acts of (dis)inheritance speak to larger dynamics of memory, power, and transformation.

The Unitarian Universalist Studies Network – founded in 2021 via a merger of the UU History and Heritage Society and UU Collegium – is committed to encouraging valuable original research done to investigate our UU and liberal religious past and to integrate findings gained from serious exploration of ethics and theology. Our work is informed by our commitment to countering oppression in all of its intersecting forms in the belief that such study will critically challenge our sense of who we have been as a religious movement, and deepen our aspiration to be a just, inclusive, and beloved community as Unitarian Universalists today.

Abstracts are sought for an edited collection on the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA).

Kate Chopin in the Classroom

The editors of this essay collection invite 250-word proposals for essays of 5,000 to 7,000 words that address an aspect of or strategy for teaching the fiction, poetry, nonfiction or life of nineteenth-century American author Kate Chopin in the contemporary classroom. What are effective strategies for high school and/or college-level students? How have you incorporated technology into your teaching of Chopin? What changes have you seen in the reception of your students over the years? For example, do they praise or condemn Edna Pontellier? What might this say about students today?

Proposals should include a title, your name and affiliation, and should be no longer than 250 words.

The VIII edition of the Congress will take place on November 19, 20 and 21, 2025 in the Auditorium of the Congress Centre “Ciutat d’Elx” (Spain) (in person format), and via our website (online format). There are 3 participation options:

> Option 1: In this modality, the proposals of the Communications will follow the main thematic line of the new edition of the Congress and the Festival: Japan and its imprint on the Fantastic Genre.

> Option 2: In this modality, the abstracts will follow the generic thematic line of the Congress: The Fantastic Genre and its possible interconnection with the different platforms of culture, audiovisual and new technologies.

In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston artistically chooses distinctive forenames and nicknames for her characters, reflecting the uniqueness and diversity of African American culture. Names like Tea Cake, Bootsie, Alphabet, or Sop-de-Bottom are informal name choices that also highlight the difference between the proper white naming conventions and the relaxed naming choices of African Americans in the South.

We invite paper proposals for the Cultural Studies Panel of the Anglistics International Conference 2025, dedicated to exploring how Anglophone cinema and television reflect, negotiate, and transform cultural identities and social realities.

This panel welcomes contributions that examine film and television as dynamic sites of cultural production and contestation. We are particularly interested in how visual media engage with issues such as race, gender, class, sexuality, migration, colonialism, globalization, and environmental crisis, drawing from interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Recent manuscript studies increasingly examine physical damage to medieval documents as intentional acts. Erasure often functioned as censorship, silencing content deemed transgressive. Conversely, damage has also been interpreted as ritualistic worship, where marks on texts or artefacts express devotion rather than destruction. This session explores erasure both as censorship and as devotional practice, investigating how such traces can be read as deliberate, symbolic interventions. By considering these forms, the session sheds light on the complex interactions between materiality, authority, and spirituality within the medieval archive.

Please note that this is a virtual session. 

2025 Dress and Body Association Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Dress and Body Association invites submissions for the organization’s sixth annual conference, which will be held on November 1-2, 2025. Consistent with our long-term goals for inclusivity and sustainability, all activities will be 100% online.

Join our Google Group to learn about opportunities and converse with members of the DBA year-round! Email to request membership: dress.body.assoc@gmail.com.

Comfort and Joy: Locating Hope in Dress and the Body

Recent years have seen an upsurge of narratives from the Global South that engage in the representation of various African cosmologies. In contrast with Western traditions, these narratives are contributing to an epistemological shift from “the study of African religion as object [to] the study of African religion as subject” (Olupona 2013: xix). 

This book will explore how religion and the sacred emerge from within the structure and narrative of The Legend of Zelda series, one of the most influential and enduring franchises in video game history. Zelda has greatly impacted multiple generations of players, and has an extremely loyal and dedicated fanbse.

Games have long used medievalist or medieval-adjacent settings to engage with audiences. Scholars have noted the various connections to be made between popular perceptions of the medieval in games and historical and textual realities of the medieval world. While games may not always make it a priority to accurately portray medieval (or pseudo-medieval) life, there are still important parallels and intertextual references that games use to harken back to the medieval world—whatever version of that that reality they choose to use as a basis, at least. Just like games construct a faux reality for their players, so too have the popular conceptions of the medieval world been carefully constructed through literature and popular culture.

The concept of orphanhood may reveal a liminal yet productive state between figures, identities, homes, cultures and languages, exposing fertile spaces for crafting (re)generative views of self and other through literary texts. As characters, orphans may become queered figures, pointing back to the vulnerable state of childhood itself; as protagonists, orphans have also been connected to the concept of the hero (Rose-Emily Rothenberg), the role of the laborer, and the emotional “regeneration” of adults (Claudia Nelson).