There has always been a need to adapt and disrupt conventions to tell one’s story and now there are almost as many forms of life writing as there are different lives. The boundaries of representation are continually being pushed. ‘Life’s Not Personal: A Creative-Critical Conference on Experimental Life Writing’ seeks to explore these narratives from both theoretical and practice-based perspectives.

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO FEB. 15

Rewriting the Abortion Narrative: The Power of Popular Culture

With the Supreme Court poised to radically change or even overturn Roe v. Wade after hearing the Mississippi Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, critical attention is being turned toward the changing ways popular culture depicts abortion. Popular culture is uniquely positioned to offer these narratives, particularly given the research that suggests that the way abortion is depicted in popular culture impacts cultural perceptions of abortion and may even, as Steph Herold has noted, “have very real ‘policy implications,’ particularly in such a politically charged climate.”   

The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) is

- devoted to literary, historical, film and cultural studies of the English-speaking world
- an international scholarly journal with an international audience available at major research centers and libraries throughout the world
- the oldest continuously published Central European scholarly journal in its field
- published twice a year by the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary.

HJEAS

CALL FOR PAPERS

KENTE: Cape Coast Journal of Literature and the Arts (CCJLA), founded by the Department of English at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, is a bi-annual peer-reviewed, open-access academic journal. For its Volume 3 (June, 2022) edition, the journal is inviting submissions that include critical analysis, theoretical models, and literature reviews in the following topic areas: Reimagining Borders in Postcolonial Migratory Narratives, Contemporary African Literature and the Environmental Imagination and Rethinking Traumas in a Covid 19 Era. Articles focusing on other relevant thematic perspectives are also strongly encouraged and expected.

Submission Guidelines

TECHNICAL STORYTELLING: COMICS AND COMMUNITY 

Special Issue of ImageTexT, Spring 2023

Guest Editors: Alexander Slotkin & Laura Gonzales

How are novels adapted for onstage presentations as musicals or operas?  Given their large numbers of characters, multiple settings, and large spans of time, the plots of novels need to be adapted to fit within the logistical and chronological realities of live theatre, as compared when novels are adapted for film or video.  Also, how is music used in these adaptations?  We seek proposals that examine how this has been done in the past and is being done now.

What strategies are contemporary life writers using to approach queer/trans pasts that remain unrecognized or unrecognizable? Possible topics may include archival silences, biofiction, LGBTQ childhoods and queer temporality, intergenerational mentorship, HIV/AIDS’ legacy, and more.

This call for papers is for a special session at the Modern Language Association 2023 conference, which means that it is a non-guaranteed panel. Please submit 250-word abstracts and CVs to Megan Paslawski (Queens College, CUNY) to be considered for the panel proposal. 

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY-SOCIETY CONFERENCE

27-30 October 2022

Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. (Hyatt Regency Hotel)

Humans live in places, the positions from which they perceive space as a series of landscapes. While space/time is the context that encompasses life and all of its possibilities and constraints, the perception of space is continuously constructed, and deconstructed, through geopolitical, social, and economic—in a word, cultural—drivers. Notions of nature, ecology, resources, and well-being are fundamental dimensions of such a process.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate infection and fatality rates among the working class, coupled with the increasing peril from climate catastrophe, has foregrounded the existential precarity of those on the unfortunate side of the wage relation and empire. This panel considers, however, that in the absence of full human flourishing—in Marx’s word, Gattungswesen—the proletariat is, in a sense, already dead prior to the expiration of their physical bodies.

The University of St. Thomas Art History, English, Museum Studies, and Creative Writing & Publishing graduate programs will host a virtual and in-person interdisciplinary conference on Friday, April 29, 2022. While papers addressing any aspect of literature, film, art history, architecture, museum studies, new media, and cultural studies will be considered, the graduate programs particularly welcome proposals for papers exploring the conference theme across all time periods, media, and geographical regions. We are also seeking creative writers to read original work related to the conference theme during a lunchtime reading performance. This conference will have both in-person and virtual presentation options.

PLEASE NOTE: This CFP closed in 2020. If you are encountering it any time in 2022 or afterwards, it is due to an error in the system. Thank you. 

The Popular Culture Research Centre (Auckland University of Technology) welcomes papers for its upcoming interdisciplinary conference on the theme of ‘storytelling and identity’ in popular culture. The conference will be held in Auckland on 7-9 July 2020.

PLEASE NOTE: This CFP closed in 2017. If you are encountering it any time in 2022 or afterwards, it is due to an error in the system. Thank you. 

PLEASE NOTE: This CFP closed in 2021. If you are encountering it any time in 2022 or afterwards, it is due to an error in the system. Thank you. 

As media texts show us superheroes from around the world(s), demonstrating extraordinary abilities and living a life shaped by a moral code, how we define their iconic features and cultural impact has been the focus of much scholarly debate.