Narrative Surplus, Literary Specificity, and the Modernist Novel at NeMLA, March 7-10, 2024 Boston, MA Host: Tufts University, School of Arts and Sciences.

What would it mean to think of a novel’s depiction of thoughts, ideas, or emotions as surplus to its plot? What details—historical, social, political—are lost if we think of narrative information as mere details and therefore surplus to literary meaning? Once we extract all essential facts, what is left for the critic to make sense of?

Surplus Invisibility: Concentrated Spaces of the Displaced and Expelled
NeMLA 2024--Boston, MA March 7-10th, 2024

Abstract deadline: September 30th, 2023

Response deadline: October 15th, 2023

The concept of surplus is largely understood in economics as “the amount of resources that exceed the portion actually utilized”. Gramsci, when touching on this idea, focuses on the rise of capitalism. However, “surplus” can refer to a host of different fields. What happens when the “surplus” is used to define the lives of human beings?

Excessive Abundance or Abundant Excess? Representations of Food in Italian and Italian-American Film, Literature, and Media

NeMLA 2024--Boston, MA March 7-10th, 2024

Abstract deadline: September 30th, 2023

Response deadline: October 15th, 2023

Continuing last year’s conversation, this panel proposes to focus on representations of food in Italian and Italian American Cinema, Literature and Media.

2023 Dress and Body Association Conference 

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Dress and Body Association invites submissions for the organization’s fourth annual conference, which will be held on November 4-5, 2023. Consistent with our long-term goals for inclusivity and sustainability, all activities will be 100% online, including keynote speaker(s), research presentations, and opportunities for virtual networking.

Visit the DBA website—www.dress-body-association.org—to learn more about this organization and consider becoming a member.

Climate Change: Implications for Dress and the Body

Panel Title: Anthropology of Literature: Negotiating Cultural Paradigms

Convenors: Dr. Kalindi Sharma, Assistant Professor, IHBAS

Email: kalindi1sharma@gmail.com;  kalindi.ihbas@delhi.gov.in

Co- Convenor: Dr. Debashree Sinha, Assistant Professor (English), Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi

Email: sinhadebashree5@gmail.com

Discussant: Prof. Indranil Acharya, Professor & Head of the Department (English), Vidyasagar University

Demystifying Mystic Falls: Race and Racism in The Vampire Diaries Franchise

From the time it premiered on The CW in 2009, The Vampire Diaries was duly castigated in the media for uncritically tiptoeing around Civil War “lost cause” mythology and overtly tokenizing its Black characters. As the public later learned, minoritized actors were also treated poorly behind the scenes. Still, the series became a cultural juggernaut, boasting two successful spin-offs (The Originals and Legacies), reviving the book series on which the show was based, and inspiring a cottage industry of franchise-related institutions and conventions that, as of 2023, is just beginning to take off.

The Northeast Popular Culture Association welcomes proposals in the area of Health, Disease and Popular Culture for its hybrid conference to be held from Thursday, October 12-Saturday, October 14, 2023.  Virtual sessions will take place on Thursday evening and Friday mornings via Zoom and in-person sessions will take place on Friday evening and Saturday morning at Nichols College. 

Current Chair: Julia Brown, Stony Brook University, julia.r.brown@stonybrook.edu

Rivers and Journeys: Discovering New Selves and New Tropes

This panel is part of the NEMLA conference taking place in Boston March 7-10, 2024.
It seeks to analyze the development of urban cultures in France while taking into account the impact of postcolonial studies since 2005, the year of the "urban riots". It also aims to discuss the political aspect of urban culture as well as the influence of American culture on French production.

Possible themes include:

· Urban literature and "banlieue" culture

· The literary aspect of French rap

· Urban culture and postcolonial studies

· French Caribbean rap

· Urban culture and social activism

· The American influence

· Global "Francophone" hip-hop

For presentation at the NeMLA conference in March of 2024:

Critics frequently frame American literary regionalism in geographical terms, whether by emphasizing a region’s spatial boundedness or emphasizing components of regionalist writing that stretch across space and scale. A similar negotiation of spatial scales from the proximate to the planetary has come to characterize recent conversations about climate change in the environmental humanities—for example in the work of Timothy Clark, Benjamin Morgan, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey. Regionalism’s engagements with place, scale, ecology, and everyday atmospheres make it a potentially generative form for representing climate, and yet few scholarly treatments have investigated the interconnections between American literary regionalism and climatic thought.

“Evolving Forms”

University of Iowa, 19-21 April 2024

Call for Papers

Silver Jubilee Issue: 25 Years of American, British and Canadian Studies: Lofty Aspirations, Protean Visions, Ongoing Quests

Deadline: 10 June 2024

Guest Editors:

Charlotte Beyer, University of Gloucestershire

Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth

Sean Matthews, University of Nottingham                     

Special Issue Consultants:

UPDATED CONTACT EMAIL! - if you have already submitted any proposals or inquiries to the previous email, these have been forwarded and are accounted for.

What a Waste! is an interdisciplinary graduate conference that seeks to explicate the position of waste in the cultural output of the post-war. This conference will be held at the University of St Andrews on 23rd September 2023, and invites proposals from postgraduates and early career researchers.