We welcome proposals that think through, reflect upon, and reconsider the significance of Aspirations in the pasts, presents, and futures of the United States. Aspirational ideals and beliefs have always been at the crux of the United States’ national ethos, but they have also evolved during the course of history. Inviting colleagues to consider a range of temporal, spatial, and performative aspects of aspirations, we posethe following questions:

CFP:Class Participation: A Must or a Bonus?

NeMLA Annual Convention, Boston, MA, March 7-10, 2024

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2023 through the NeMLA portal: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20518

Creating Camelot(s): The Idea of Community in Arthurian Texts (virtual)

Sponsored by Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain and International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)

Organizers: Michael A. Torregrossa and Joseph M. Sullivan

Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 15 September 2023

59th International Congress on Medieval Studies

Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan)

Hybrid event: Thursday, 9 May, through Saturday, 11 May, 2024

Session Objective

Creating Camelot(s): The Idea of Community in Arthurian Texts (virtual) 

Destabilizing Trans-Corporealities

This MLA special session invites proposals exploring Brit Pop, 90s musical resurgence/new albums (Blur, The Cure, etc.), or any aspects of contemporary pop music related to genre, lyric poetry, and poetics in 2023 and beyond. Broader interpretations of the theme are certainly welcome.

Kindly submit your abstract (250-350 words) as well as a short bio to:

Ariana Lyriotakis, Trinity College Dublin | lyriotaa@tcd.ie

Please reach out with any further questions or clarifications that might be needed. The presidential theme for MLA 2024 (Philadelphia, PA) is Celebration: Joy and Sorrow.

Speculative Fiction (SF) creators regularly imagine worlds in precipitous decline where the privileged few live in a safe, prosperous, hazard-free enclave from which surplus subaltern populations are excluded. What do these stories of safety for the few while the “surplus” rot outside or join a captive servant class status tell us about our own concepts of borders, citizenship, and expendability? Presenters are invited to engage with one or more texts using cultural studies, postcolonial theory, or other relevant analytic tool to analyze how gated communities function in the SF canon or the real world.

In May 2023, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville replied, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans,” when asked by Richard Banks, a radio host for WBHM in Alabama, if he believed white nationalists should be allowed in the U.S. military. Tuberville, who later said “I look at a white nationalists [sic] as a Trump Republican,” also later slightly recanted, stating that, “We agree that we should not be characterizing Trump supporters as white nationalists.” However, Tuberville’s initial comments and impulses create and reinforce a corollary that to be American is to be white.

Call for Book Chapters

 Jayanta Mahapatra: Modern Critical Views

We invite scholars, researchers, and literary enthusiasts to contribute to the upcoming edited book Jayanta Mahapatra: Modern Critical Viewsthat aims to delve into the multifaceted dimensions of the celebrated poet, Jayanta Mahapatra. As one of India's foremost poets, Mahapatra's work has left an indelible mark on the landscape of contemporary Indian poetry. This volume intends to critically explore his poetic corpus, shedding light on its thematic richness, artistic innovations, and its relevance in the larger literary discourse.

Call for papers for a Special Cluster in a/b: Autobiography Studies 

Spaniards across the Americas after the Spanish Civil War: “I am from the Country Called Exile” / Españoles en las Américas después de la Guerra Civil: “Soy del país del exilio”  

Though the Internet has been around since the 1980s, the “Internet novel” as a genre has only really emerged in the last decade or so. We can think of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021), Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021), and Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing (2021) as notable recent examples. Each of these novels take as their topic the particular and peculiar confines of the digital world we live in. Lockwood has described this sensation as falling through a “long void that never reaches the bottom,” while Brandon Taylor claims that “the Internet Novel captures some of the weird Gothic horror that white people have come, by way of their new digital Calvinism, to accept as being inherent to digital life.”

2025 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship

The University of Chicago Press and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society are pleased to announce the competition for the 2025 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship. Named in honor of the founding editor of Signs, the Catharine Stimpson Prize is designed to recognize excellence and innovation in the work of emerging feminist scholars.

In 1982 Robert Neville wrote, “The encounter of Christianity with the world’s other religions has shaken Christian theology to its foundations.” One recent response to this trauma is the so-called “theology without walls” movement, in which Neville has been an active participant. Unlike another response, namely comparative theology (which remains “confessional” or married to the truth of one’s starting or “home” religion), theology without walls is willing and eager to explore other religions—even non-religious sources—in what Jerry Martin calls “an effort to understand ultimate reality as fully as possible.”

https://victorianpopularfiction.org/publications/1200-2/

The work of Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018), in its preoccupations, scope and politics, exemplifies that of the post-war generation of radical European auteurs: initial films made in the shadow of Neo-Realism, and under the influence of the French New Wave (The Grim Reaper, Before the Revolution); a full embrace of the events of 1968 (Partner, Agonia); a late modernist art cinema that interrogated the scandal of Italian war-time history and exerted a profound influence on other film-makers – particularly those of New Hollywood (The Conformist, The Spider’s Stratagem); a global “success de scandale” with Last Tango in Paris, which was still in the headlines half a century later, via #MeToo; a particularly 1970s