The theme of environmental crisis has been present in the public debate for several decades, and forcefully resurfaced in 2015 when the 2030 Agenda containing the goals of sustainable development was launched, including the preservation of all forms of life, the struggle against global warming and the production of clean and renewable energy. In the same year, the publication of the papal encyclical Laudato si’ on “integral ecology” and the conclusion of the Paris agreements on climate change also prompted debate on this theme. Throughout the years, environmental issues have progressively permeated the realm of scientific research as well.

The organizing committee of the 2022 British Women Writers Conference recognizes that recent Omicron surge has made the start of many people’s semesters challenging. For that reason, we are extending the abstract deadline to January 31st. Thank you to all who have already submitted their abstracts. We are looking forward to an exciting and energizing event May 19–21!

MLA 2023, San Francisco

Examining poetry, art, or other media, Queering the Pre-Raphaelites invites proposals exploring the diverse ways same-sex, trans-, and nonbinary desires inform or shape the circulation of figures central to or on the periphery of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood/Sisterhood. Please include a 250-word abstract and short bio no later than Monday, 28 February 2022, to jnixon@salemstate.edu & lauraamurray@usf.edu.

Configurations of Friday’s Body

A Special Issue of the Nordic Journal of English Studies

Ed. by Patrick Gill and Jakub Lipski

When Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, it confronted readers with a newly developed realism expressed, among other things, through the detailed description of its characters’ worlds and bodies. The connection between mind and body or physical and spiritual world was more than allegorical to eighteenth-century readers: it represented a literal and immediate correspondence, so that discourses of the body in much eighteenth-century fiction can be read as material figurations of character.

We are seeking essays and papers for an edited collection which engages the concept of ‘dark academia.’ 

At the center of the dark academic sensibility lies a paradox: though dark academia enjoys the cosmetic trappings of the pursuit of higher knowledge, it is at its core a celebration of the university as a place of occultation and performativity. The dark academic’s taste for mystery, history, and a distinctly Anglophone, Romantico-Modernist canon – coupled with an equally distinct early 20th century sartorial and lifestyle model – runs inevitably into exclusivity, elitism, and reactionary nostalgia. Indeed, the case can be made that these very elements are in fact constitutive of dark academia, as such. 

Counter-Image International Conference 2022 and Photo Impulse Final Conference - Decolonizing visuality: working towards sustainable sociocultural practices

Lisbon, 13th to 15th July 2022

I am currently soliciting abstracts of 250 words for essays to be included in a book which will examine the richness and relevance of Mel Brooks’ body of work, from its beginnings in stand-up comedy and improvisation, the broad farce and parody for which Brooks is so well known, his forays into drama and his success on Broadway. I welcome proposals that foreground Brooks’ significant contributions to American culture and comedy. Proposals may examine an individual or a number of Brooks’ works, Brooks’ work as a comedian or a dramatist, and Brooks as a writer, actor, director, or producer of television, film or on Broadway.

Submissions (2/28/2022 & Rolling Thereafter)

 Survive and Thrive (S & T) seeks papers, creative nonfiction, personal narratives, poetry, visual arts, and media in the medical humanities for its open issue (nearly complete for Spring 2022) and its poetry issue (Fall-Winter 2022).  Deadlines for earliest consideration are the last day of February 2022;  deadlines for subsequent issues will roll throughout the year.  See https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/

 Aims & Scope (2/28/2022)

Horror Studies – Proposed special issue on Folk Horror  

Guest editors, Dr Dawn Keetley, Professor of English and Film, Lehigh University, dek7@lehigh.edu, and Dr Jeffrey A. Tolbert, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Folklore, Pennsylvania State University – Harrisburg, jat639@psu.edu 

COMPENDIUM

Journal of Comparative Studies

Materialities of the Photobook

Deadline for submissions: July 31, 2022

Editors:

David Campany (International Center of Photography/U. Westminster)

José Bértolo (U. Nova de Lisboa/Caldas da Rainha School of Arts & Design)

The Department of English and Cultural Studies, School of Arts and Humanities, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bannerghatta Road Campus, Bangalore, India, invites papers for an annual postgraduate conference on Theory and Activism: Can the twain meet? on February 2nd & 3rd. 

Concept Note:

32nd Annual Conference of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS)

Goethe University Frankfurt, 26-29 May, 2022

Keynotes/Plenary Speakers/Writers
Sinan Antoon (Iraq/USA) | Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria) | Blessing Obada (Germany/Nigeria) | Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya) | Michael Rothberg (UCLA) | Arundhati Roy (India)Extended deadline for individual papers and panels: 15 February 2022

Two hundred years ago, P. B. Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry that the language of poets ‘is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things.’ Poetry, which is ‘not like reasoning, […] creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.’ In this way, Shelley gave enduring expression to what S. T. Coleridge had hinted at three years earlier, when he complained in Pope of ‘matter and diction […] characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry.’ Poetry apprehends, formulates, creates, and cognizes in a manner unique to itself and irreducible to any other forms of reasoning or reflection.

In Episode 9 of James Joyce's Ulysses, “Scylla and Charybdis,” Stephen Dedalus develops a theory about the origins of Shakespeare’s works that is both original and controversial. It is in the National Library of Ireland that Dedalus, in a wild and winding conversation, develops his ‘Hamlet theory’. The episode stages the strong and sometimes comic appeal of a biographical approach to Shakespeare’s works and, at the same time, casts Dedalus – Joyce’s alter ego – variously as Hamlet, Hamlet’s father, Shakespeare, and as a modern-day Ulysses.