“In olden days a glimpse of stocking / Was looked on as something shocking. / Now, heaven knows, Anything goes.” This epigraph begins Chris Jenks’ 2003 work Transgression, exemplifying the sense in which acts of transgression can have real, tangible, palpable effects on society. Jenks defines “transgression” as violating, infringing upon, or going beyond the limits set by a boundary or convention (2). Transgressive fiction, then, is the genre of literature that depicts various acts of boundary-crossing in order to analyze and criticize them for the purpose of reflecting upon the ideological constructions that its characters react against or wholly reject.

NeMLA meets next during the centennial of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and the sesquicentennial of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’s initial serialization. Central to both storylines is their eponymous characters’ differing relationships to suicide. From a less literary perspective, the moment comes relatively quick on the heels of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, on June 24, 2022, undermining reproductive rights by undermining substantive due process rights generally, and so also euthanasic rights. The convergence is an auspicious occasion to explore women’s historical, literary, and philosophical perspectives on suicide.

All disciplines, methods, and perspectives welcome.

Famed and enigmatic filmmaker Terrence Malick’s remarkable filmography turned fifty recently. It begins with Badlands, that is, which appeared on October 15, 1973, followed five years later by Days of Heaven (1978). He returns after a twenty-five year hiatus with a triptych of literary and historical adaptations, including The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), and The Tree of Life (2011).

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.

Climate and the Limits of Narratability

A panel to be pitched for inclusion in the 2025 conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in Miami, April 2–6, 2025.

Organizer: Daniel Aureliano Newman, University of Toronto

Call for Well-Qualified Guest Reviewers

The international peer-reviewed Creative Industries Journal [CIJ] (Routledge/ Taylor and Francis), now in its 17th volume and approaching its 16th year, seeks to create a pool of guest reviewers, who possess the requisite expertise, to complement our Peer Review Board and Editorial team.

Specifically, the journal is currently looking for those with expertise in the business of the creative industries, music, architecture,  software, media and digital media, film, video games, art, crafts, design, fashion.

Guest Reviewers

New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creaive Writing (Taylor and Francis / Routledge) seeks guest reviewers with the requisite expertise for its registry of esteemed guest reviewers.

New Writing is one of the world's leading journals in Creative Writing and Creative Writing Studies.. The Peer Review Board - appointed after extensive international review - deals with the range of submitted material (creative and critical). Occasional additional opinions are sought from guest reviewers with the requisite expertise. 

The journal can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rmnw20/current

Maria von Herbert’s 1792-94 correspondence with Immanuel Kant—arising out of her despair and suicidal ideation, coupled with her commitment of his philosophical perspective, including his famously uncompromising prohibition of suicide—has enjoyed increasingly careful attention in the roughly forty years now since Beverley Brown and Rae Langton’s invitations to this effect, in the mid-eighties and early-nineties—most recently as the subject of the annual Kant Reading Party at the University of St Andrews, in July and August of 2023, out of which a volume of new translations and critical materials will soon emerge.

The George Saunders Society invites prospective participants for one or two panels at the 2025 American Literature Association conference in Boston, MA, to be held May 21 to 25, 2025. We are interested in presentations on any aspect of George Saunders’s life and work; in this, our fifth year of activity at ALA (returning after an absence in 2024!), we continue to be interested in papers that challenge, complicate, or go beyond the most common (particularly religious, ethical, or new sincerest) readings of the author’s work in the critical literature to this point. The topic is therefore open, but possible approaches might include:

Please note that abstract submissions must be sent through the ACLA submission portal online. For details, see the seminar posting on the ACLA website: https://www.acla.org/comparative-literature-and-politics-detranslation 

The 2025 annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association will be held virtually, May 29-June 1, 2025.

The Journal of Critical Race Inquiry (JCRI) is currently soliciting submissions for our 2025 open issue. We invite interdisciplinary work with critical and intersectional approaches to race and racialization. In addition to scholarly essays, JCRI welcomes the submission of visual, literary, digital, and audio art and performance documentation relevant to our mandate, as well as activist roundtables, interviews, and shorter essays.

We publish work that features

Notes from the Field, a publication of the TPS Collective, is accepting submissions about teaching and working with primary sources for three series of peer-reviewed blog posts: “Language,” “Teach

“A New World of Information”: Modernism and Data

Digital & Analog Cultures

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

46th Annual Conference, February 19-22, 2025

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico