“In this nineteenth century, the religious idea is undergoing a crisis,” Victor Hugo declares in Les Misérables (1864); “People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.” Nineteenth-century culture is marked by intertwined revolutions in literature and religion. Across the globe, just as religion became increasingly questioned, it also became fuel for social change and cultural reformation.

Educators empower students through narrative nonfiction and writing that allows for empathy, candid discussion, and articulation of self. This roundtable will seek to examine how narrative nonfiction literature and writing is used in a variety of contexts and courses to engage students and empower them to embrace facets of their identities and strengthen their ties to our national and international community.

This roundtable seeks collegiate voices that will contribute to a robust conversation on narrative nonfiction literature and writing with a focus on how we use narrative nonfiction and writing to help students navigate conceptions of their identity and negotiate their place in the world. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

Call for Essays

Studies in Memory of Donald C. Baker (1928-2019)

Call for essays for a book on the late medievalist Donald C. Baker who left us in 2019.

Donald C. Baker taught English Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for twenty years then pursued teaching opportunities in Finland, England, Tunisia, Jordan, and Macau. 

Donald C. Baker published or co-published a variety of books and articles (in PMLA, Studia Neophilologica, Speculum, Studies in Philology, Philological Quarterly, The Literary)  on Geoffrey Chaucer and Beowulf in particular.

All forms of liteary studies (around 6,000 words using APA style) are welcome.

“Austin Clarke, Black Studies and Black Diasporic Memory”

Conference Dates: September 26 - 27, 2024,

Deadline for abstracts: July 31, 2024

Notification of decisions by: August 15, 2024

Co-organizers: Ronald Cummings (McMaster University), Darcy Ballantyne (Toronto Metropolitan University), 

Keynote Speaker: Rinaldo Walcott, 

Professor and Chair in Africana and American Studies, University at Buffalo

We are constantly engaged in processes of reading. We read literary texts, historical sources, films and other media, political moods and affects, and shifting social formations. Amongst the plethora of reading strategies available to us, close reading is perhaps the most widely known and most accepted one in literary studies (cf. I.A. Richards and William Empson). Other approaches to texts include ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative reading’ (Sedgwick 1997), ‘distant reading’ (Moretti 2000), ‘wide reading’ (Hallet 2010), and ‘surface reading’ (Best and Marcus 2009), to name just a few. More recent research has examined intermedial reading practices (Rippl 2015), the reading of affects (Brinkema 2014), and non/institutional readers (Emre 2017). 

The Environmental Humanities is currently experiencing an unprecedented influx of creative and critical works from writers of Indigenous literature. This literary revolution, closely linked to climate change and environmental discourse, is a contributing factor, and writers are at the forefront of this contemporary debate. This session offers a unique opportunity for presenters to contribute to a significant academic debate by exploring paradigm shifts in Indigenous environmental discourse. The works will delve into the intersection of gender, class, race, and the Anthropocene, offering a comprehensive understanding.

2027 would mark 80 years of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent of 1947. For South Asia, independence from over two centuries of British rule in 1947 was accompanied by a violent and bloody partition - a territorial division of two provinces of British India, Punjab and Bengal  - on the basis of religious majority, which led to a million people dead in bloody communal riots and fifteen million people uprooted and displaced across the newly-formed borders.

Maryse Condé’s œuvre has tremendously impacted our understanding of the French Caribbean and Africa, but also of postcolonial France and the Americas as a whole. In a sense, she is truly « a writer for our times, » as the title of a recent tribute in Paris suggested. 

This panel includes various African American writers who used literature, art, history, or social scientific writings to oppose faulty presentations of an inferior tertium quid, i.e., subhuman capability. This panel welcomes review of writers and artists alike who endeavored through artistic, literary, historical, musical, filmic, or other means to contend with pseudo social scientific Untermensch designation. Writings and other media at various times and through varying genres and artistic forms, fashioned to make a case for full cultural and intellect parity.

The transnational turn in modernist studies has helped generate important scholarly works— Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (Jessica Berman, Cambridge UP, 2001),  Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (edited by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, Indiana UP, 2005), Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (Rebecca Walkowitz, Columbia UP, 2006), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (edited by Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, Oxford UP, 2012), Chimeras of Form (Aarthi Vadde, Columbia UP, 2016), and many other publications— over the last two decades which have examined how modernism transcends national borders and reveals the aporias of nationhood.

Recent developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI) are currently transforming literary and visual studies—raising issues that range from copyright infringement; to human-computer interaction and collaboration; to the inspirations for human creativity. More broadly, this new technology can lead us to reconsider key issues in the fields of education, media, visual arts, music—and the future of the humanities.

The last twenty years have marked a wave of renewed interest in social reproduction theory, from the republication of work associated with the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign from theorists like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici, to new works by Federici and a host of new thinkers focused on questions of social reproduction including Kathi Weeks, Nancy Fraser, Sophie Lewis, M.E. O’Brien, and Premilla Nadasen. Lewis, O'Brien, and Weeks have helped return attention to Marx and Engels's call for "the abolition of the family," and elaborated the history and scope of this demand for social revolution.

CFP Convalescence in 19th- and 20th-century anglophone literature

26-27 June 2025, CRINI, Nantes Université & Daulat Ram College, Delhi University

Organisers: Leslie de Bont, Aude Petit-Marquis, Sanna Melin Schyllert, Deepshikha Mahanta Bortamuly, Violina Borah

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism seeks original, well-researched, and intellectually rigorous papers about texts from any time period and literary tradition. We are now accepting submissions for the Fall 2024 issue. Submissions are due by September 22, 2024.