“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds; what worlds make stories.”

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. 

“An ingenuity too astonishing”: The Poetry of Amy Clampitt

36th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, May 21-24, 2025 (Boston)

We are seeking 15–20-minute paper proposals on the work of Amy Clampitt for a session at the annual American Literature Association Conference, to be held in Boston, May 21-24, 2025. We are interested in abstracts that examine Clampitt’s work from a variety of perspectives. As such, we have kept this call fairly capacious. Potential topics may include but are in no way limited to:

To apply to this ACLA seminar, please go to: https://www.acla.org/node/47634 

This seminar invites submissions that explore intentional illegibilites deployed in literary and visual forms in the African diasporas of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Despite their intertwined histories of slavery and colonialism, these regions have typically been understood as hermetically sealed off from one another in the humanities. The fields of literary studies and visual culture, however, illustrate how racialized subjects across these aqueous geographies have relied on shared strategies of opacity and obfuscation, leveraging forms such as the photograph and the novel whose histories and development were imbricated in colonial processes.

This roundtable invites proposals that explore the intersection of visual, aural, and verbal frontiers.  Although ekphrasis and musical form mirror words, they directly affect the emotions at a primordial level not available to verbal articulation. Ekphrasis translates words into visual images, whereas musical form translates them into sounds and rhythms. What are the differences between these modes of expression and how they affect their audiences?

This roundtable is part of NeMLA's 56th annual convention, to be held in Philadelphia, PA, March 3-6, 2025. To submit propoosals, follow these steps. 

Navigate to nemla.org

Navigate to Convention>Call for Proposals>Ekphrasis and the Music of Literature

The Charles Olson Society and the Jonathan Bayliss Society are pleased to announce a collaborative panel to be held at the upcoming American Literature Association Conference in Boston, May 21-24, 2025. This panel will focus on writers who were inspired by Gloucester, Massachusetts and Cape Ann. The richness of Cape Ann, its history, people, and geography, deeply influenced poets Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini as well as novelist Jonathan Bayliss. How did these figures incorporate Gloucester’s geography, history, population, ecology, or other distinct elements in their work? How does place influence and determine the nature of a poet’s or novelist’s writing?

Dr Katarina Gregersdotter and Dr Berit Åström, Umeå University, Sweden invite original essays for an edited volume on fungal horror in popular culture. Palgrave Macmillan have expressed a provisional interest in publishing the volume. 

Fungi are entangled in our lives, as food, as medicine or drugs, but also as parasites and agents of destruction, such as black mould, dry rot and cordyceps, the zombie fungus. This entanglement carries over into popular culture, where fungi are used to carry out different kinds of work, articulating deep seated fears and desires, functioning as a threat to, but perhaps also a saviour of, an embattled humanity at the brink of possible extinction. 

Margins, an international peer-reviewed journal, is published annually by the Department of English, Gauhati University. It offers a space for the exploration of the marginal in its theoretical implications and in literature and culture through four kinds of writings: 

1. It welcomes examination of the historical and the contemporary through interdisciplinary perspectives – looking at texts in both their wider conceptual and immediate situational significance (7500 and 10,000 words). 

Call for Essays

Edited Anthology

The Heroine's Tale: Reimagining The Female Hero's Journey in the New Millennium 

We are seeking essays for an edited collection titled “The Heroine's Tale: Reimagining The Female Hero's Journey in the New Millennium.” This collection considers the role of the contemporary heroine, aiming to take stock of existing conversations and debates related to cultural and creative representations of heroines and heroinism and providing the basis for new directions of inquiry.

Borderlands: Reimagining the Medieval Periphery

MEST Symposium, Indiana University Bloomington

April 11-12

Keynote: Dr. Dorsey Armstrong (Purdue University)

The Middle Ages and our study of it are defined by borderlands. To better understand and enrich our knowledge of the medieval world, this conference asks us to consider what lies at its peripheries and what happens when we attend carefully to these “borderlands.” 

Potential panels might consider:

Global Historical Fictions

Defining historical fictions as encompassing of many media forms, this book series invites contributions that consider the multiple ways in which we shape history for diverse purposes, and that investigate popular history in a variety of contexts, and modes.

We are pleased to invite you to submit your original research articles and review papers in the forthcoming special issue of Anglica Wratislaviensia devoted to the concept of companionship in its various social, technological, historical manifestations.

Literary forms like the poems, novels, and short stories are often understood to be stand-ins for political resistance in critical theoretical debates especially since the dominance of post-al theories within literature departments. For literary forms emerging in the peripheries of the literary world system yoked by the global literary marketplace, the signification of resistance acts as a marker of value. This is superimposed on the idea of literary forms emerging from the peripheral locales of the literary world system that are read as derivative and mimetic of literary forms emerging from the core of the same system.

The publication of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, in some ways, marked the end of New Criticism. The two approaches—structuralism and New Criticism—represent two ways of seeing texts as unities, yet produce entirely different views on key issues, such as how texts might be grouped together, the importance of historical context to the literary text, and the role of broader cultural systems in shaping a text’s meaning. We might wonder now whether or not these issues and ideas from New Criticism and structuralism, rooted in mid-20th century literary theory, continue to offer valuable insights and methodologies.