This panel explores the ways educators are engaging with anti-racist practices in their classrooms, institutions, and communities as we re-invision the future of our profession.

The Modern Language Association will take place January 6-9 2022 in Washington D.C., and should include some hybrid components.

Edited collection: Call for essay proposals

Interminable Rhetorics: Women and Gendered Labor in a Post-2020 Economy

Editors: Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Jessie McCrary, Georgia State University

lgaillet@gsu.edu and jmccrary@gsu.edu

We seek articles that explore how the conflation of 2020 events played out in the lives of women.

In this special issue on Kashmir, we look at the dramatic change in the status of Kashmir that was effected with the reading down/abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019 and the aftermath of this moment. While Kashmir has been violated for decades, the removal of all special status with the abrogation was more than a symbolic change and not just because of the escalation in violence, the most dramatic internet shutdown in any modern nation. What has changed with this abrogation? What did that moment mean for Kashmir and what does it mean for its future?

Hello, everyone. I'm editing a series with Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington on a line of academic books critically analyzing elements of Jewish science fiction and fantasy (that's the series title). https://rowman.com/action/series/les/lexjsf As such, I’d love some authors with concepts to write about.

At this stage, a paragraph-long proposal emailed to valerie@calithwain.com with a subject of JEWISH SPEC-FIC would be great. Here are some examples:

The Secret Jewish Roots of Star Wars (or some other top franchise)

The Marxist Literary Group is seeking proposals for its guaranteed session at MLA 2022, which is currently scheduled to be held in Washington D.C. from January 6th - 9th, 2022. 

How is our understanding of particular genres, or even the concept of genre itself, shaped by Marxist thought? We welcome discussions of popular film, television, or literature. Please submit 300-word abstracts and bio to mmacer2@uic.edu and ahbrown@sas.upenn.edu by March 15th, 2021.

In view of recent and current global events, the phone camera has emerged as an important and effective political apparatus. The centrality, proliferation, and prominence of phone footage across contemporary screen media and media platforms suggests that the phone camera is no longer just an indulgent phone fixture, but rather, an invaluable truth-telling tool. Practical, accessible, and autonomously used, the phone camera has been an essential technology to the present-day exposures of injustice, violence, and corruption around the world.

It is said that sometimes words get in the way of a good story.

If that is the case, let’s write a story with as few words as possible. In fact, tell us a story in 12 words exactly.

The ABC’s of our Keep It Short and Simple 12-word contest can be explained in, well, 12-words: 

Articulate a story or concept with
Brevity in an interesting
Creative way.

Even small words count (we believe in the power of the little guys) and contractions count as one word (because working together makes us better).

This is a chance to challenge yourself to try something a little different and have some fun doing it!

Learn More and Register at TheWriteContest.com

We are now accepting entries for our Short Story contest. Writers of any kind any are welcome to enter.

Early Registration ($25) Ends April 1st / Registration ($35) Ends April 22nd

Prizes:
1st place wins $500, an “Ask the author?” Zoom session, and books from our judges in your chosen format.
2nd place wins $350.
3rd place wins $150.

In the Short Story Contest we give you a genre, a character prompt, and a location prompt. You write the best story you can, within the word count given.

All submissions are reviewed by our professional team and winners are chosen by our featured judging panel.

Speculative fiction covers a broad range of narrative styles and genres.  The cohesive element that pulls works together under the category is that there is some “unrealistic” element, whether it’s magical, supernatural, or a futuristic/technological development: works that fall into the category stray from conventional realism in some way.   For this reason, speculative fiction can be quite broad, including everything from fantasy and magical realism to horror and science fiction—from China Miéville to Margaret Atwood to Philip K. Dick. This panel aims to explore those unrealistic elements and all their varied implications about society, politics, economics, and more. 

1. The International Nabokov Society invites paper proposals for a guaranteed session at MLA 2022 (Washington, D.C., 6-9 January 2022).  We invite papers on Nabokov’s languages, the transnational and  multi-lingual Nabokov, his invented languages, translation (between languages, cultures and different genres and media), Nabokov’s theory of language, Nabokov’s style,  etc.  We particularly welcome comparative, transnational, and intermedial perspectives.  Please send 250-word abstracts and brief CVs to siggy.frank@nottingham.ac.uk and zokuzmanovich@davidson.edu by 15  March 2021.

MLA 2022 Non-Guaranteed Session CFP: Comics on the Border

(DEADLINE: 3/15/2021)

Call for Papers for a proposed non-guaranteed roundtable sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum to be held (if accepted) at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Jan. 6-9, 2022, in Washington D.C.

Comics are defined by borders in formal representation and structure, in the boundaries between word and image and generic categories, in the networks and communities of mainstream and alternative production and circulation.

This two-day interdisciplinary symposium invites scholars to examine early modern women’s agency from a transnational perspective. Conversations about women’s agency continue to ripple across the world, from new, passionate campaigns in Mexico and Poland that have fought to address feminicide and sexual violence, to the Women’s Marches, which have annually inspired global response. Now, we turn with fresh urgency to early modern women’s participation in intellectual and literary cultures that bridged regional, national, and transnational divides.

The Jonathan Bayliss Society (www.jonathanbayliss.org) invites proposals for papers to be presented at the following roundtable at the 2021 American Literature Association annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts, July 7-11, 2021.

Please note: If a selected panelist is unable to travel to Boston because of the Pandemic, we may allow an electronic presentation, such as through Zoom.

In the context of the current viral pandemic, we look with fresh intensity at figurations of the invalid and of disease and disability in James’s fictional and non-fictional writing. With an eye to the cultural and political aspects of public health measures aimed at managing the spread of an infectious pathogen, we ask in particular about the relation in James’s work of sickness, subjectivity and society. How do James’s texts relate social experience to bodily ill-health or impairment? Does James position the invalid as a figure indicative of dysfunction in the larger social body, or suggest, in contrast, that illness or disability may be associated with an excess of social contact, a failure of ‘social distancing’?