In “Where Would We Be? Legacies, Roll Calls, and the Teaching of Writing in HBCUs (2021),” Beverly Moss asserts that “Black rhetorical excellence has thrived at HBCUs. Pedagogical and scholarly creativity in the teaching of writing has excelled” (146). However, it is her critical question that anchors this proposal: “where would we, in composition studies, be without writing and rhetoric faculty who have taught or currently teach at HBCUs and/or scholars in the field who are alumni of HBCUs?” (145). The creation of the HBCU Symposium on Rhetoric and Composition in 2016 helped to bring some of these contributions from the margins into the center of conversations about the teaching of writing that happens on HBCU campuses across the country.

In her most recent book, Posthuman Feminism, Rosi Braidotti calls on posthumanist educators to develop “an affirmative ethics that acknowledges the shared desire of all entities to persevere in their collaborative interdependence and to increase it for the common good” (118). She advocates for pedagogical praxis as a methodological innovation (and challenge) that draws on new materialism as a foundational theory and carnal empiricism as a method.

We hope to consider the following questions with a collaborative group of participants:

*What are concrete, shareable ways to put posthumanist/feminist/new materialist theory into practice (praxis) in the everyday higher ed classroom?

Who Was that Masked Woman? Representations of Women Vigilantes and Outlaws in Popular Media from Reconstruction to the Great Depression

We are looking for two chapters to complete a manuscript currently in development with a publisher.  We invite chapter proposals for a collection of critical essays that examine how women vigilantes, anti-heroines, and outlaws were represented in movie serials, radio dramas, films, comics, and pulp fiction in America at the turn of the century.  

“The Art of Losing”: Loss in Literature and Film

Panel Session, NeMLA’s 54th Annual Convention in Niagara Falls, March 23-26

In her iconic poem “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop writes of “the art of losing.” The poem’s speaker first recounts the loss of small things such as “lost door keys” and “an hour badly spent”; then, the losses grow in import: “my mother’s watch,” “three loved houses,” “two cities,” “two rivers, a continent,” and finally, “even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love).”

CFP – Roundtable

Creativity and Innovation in French and Francophone Curricula

54th Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention

Niagara Falls, NY

March 23-26, 2023

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2022

Strategies of Speculation in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (panel)

NeMLA Annual Convention (Niagara Falls, NY; 23-26 March 2023)

Medical sociologist Arthur Frank argues in his foundational The Wounded Storyteller that an ideal illness narrative accepts contingency and acknowledges that “the human body, for all its resilience, is fragile” (49). About her own illness experience, Audre Lorde famously argues that our greatest strength stems - paradoxically, perhaps - from our greatest vulnerability (Cancer Journals 14). Both of these perspectives suggest that resilience is finite, and that recognizing as much can be itself empowering. This panel therefore wonders: what potential does fragility have in a world rife with environmental disasters, personal and structural traumas and other catastrophes that all seem to demand resilience?

NeMLA's 54th Annual Convention 

Niagara Falls, NY March 23-26, 2023

Creative Writing Panel - "Voices in Diaspora"

The term diaspora refers to the dispersion of a people from their native land; and often, there is a subjective emotional attachment whereas such feelings are determined by cultural identity. We see this illustrated in works by writers such as Elizabeth Nunez, V.S. Naipaul, Yaa Gyasi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Jhumpa Lahiri as they examine themes such as nostalgia, alienation, displacement, and resilience in the face of adversity. This creative panel will consist of emerging writers who use their works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to illustrate the various experiences connected to living in diaspora.

Over the past twenty years, refugee studies has turned toward a critical encounter with the legal studies framework that had previously dominated it. Scholars such as those in the Critical Refugee Studies Collective have emphasized the position of refugee as one that creates new forms of relationship across spaces and times unbound (but not unmarked) by the state.

Narratives of Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum - NeMLA Conference 2023

Adaptation studies has contended with the question of hierarchies since it first emerged. Adaptation as a process similarly so: the problem of the source and the ‘original’ has established certain values and positions of texts. This has been challenged most notably through the debate in the field around fidelity, wherein the question of being ‘true’ to the source has been variously deemed fallacious, unhelpful, or both. Despite some recent proponents for it, what emerges from this is the challenging of the hierarchies that the fidelity debate espouses. Broadly, this has been main way in which these hierarchies have been challenged in adaptations, primarily due to the seemingly inescapable status fidelity has in the field.

We are pleased to announce we are accepting abstracts for chapters for our tentatively titled book, Teaching Black American Speculative Fiction & Beyond: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism. This proposed collection is based on our popular 2021 NCTE Assembly on American Literature (AAL) session, which focused on American speculative fiction and issues of social justice. The collection will focus on equity, justice, and antiracism within different genres/modes of speculative fiction (e.g., science fiction, fantasy, horror) and various formats (e.g., short and long fiction, film, graphic novels, comics, and plays).

I am in need of ONE essay for a collection called Outlander as Crime Fiction, pre-approved to be published by McFarland. A Ph.D. is preferred but please feel free to send your proposal even if you are a doctoral student. Email me if you would like to discuss an idea before submitting a proposal. At this point, I only need one paragraph describing your general topic/idea. The completed essay due date is flexible but I'm looking at probably Sept/Oct. 2022 at the latest. Most of the collection has already been written. 

Topic: Crimes of the British Empire in Diana Gabaldon's Lord John (and Outlander) Series

Archives of Indian Cinema: Methodologies, Creativities and Urgencies

De Montfort University (UK), Savitribai Phule Pune University (India), Loughborough University (UK),

21st and 22nd October 2022

Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune