This panel will discuss how the conception and operation of “crisis” intersect with issues of gender and the cultural codes of society. Assuming a broad temporal scope for the Middle Ages (c.500 CE–c.1500 CE), the panel is interested in examining how societal constructions of gender triggered and were, in turn, shaped and reshaped by disruptions and upheavals in religious life, literary culture, economic structure, and political organization. With its capacity to span the distance between private and public realms, can gender mediate the conceptualization of internal and subjective crises as well as large-scale social tensions and changes?

Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner. I am planning an essay collection to commemorate Patricia (and already have an academic publisher that’s “definitely interested”). Pretty much any aspect on Patricia’s life and works would be welcome. There may also be a conference, but it would probably be a Zoom meeting. If you're interested, please contact me as soon as possible.

The Front Runner: athletics and homosexuality (the last taboo?), college life, fan mail, global reception, Olympic Games

The Fancy Dancer: Catholicism, smalltown homosexuality, Native American heritage

By all accounts, we are living in a new age of form in literary criticism: the last decade has seen a slew of monographs, articles, and special issues devoted to what Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian have called “the millennial reboot of formalism,” (Kramnick and Nersessian 2017, 652) one largely devoted to the political revivification of form. While these projects vary widely, they are united, in some ways, by a major omission: the body.

“Comparative Dylan @ Comparative Drama”

Comparative Drama Conference

Orlando, FL, April 4-6, 2024

Deadline: October 12, 2023

Bob Dylan has been performing on stage for six decades. However, his relationship to other performance arts remains underexplored and underappreciated. This panel will put Dylan’s work as a singer-songwriter and performance artist in conversation with relevant dramatic works, performances, and stage traditions.

Broadly speaking, I am looking for paper proposals in the following areas:

2024 International Congress of Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo)

This panel invites papers considering the global reach and expanse of Petrarch and Petrarchan concepts, as reflected in: 1.) the poet’s work itself, 2.) his engagement with other literary and linguistic traditions, and 3.) intertextual responses to his work. Countering longstanding perceptions of an “insular” Petrarch who primarily gazes inward while losing sight of other perspectives and horizons, this panel considers the sociopolitical, transhistorical, comparative, intertextual, interlinguistic, and plurilinguistic frameworks that permit an understanding of a more capacious Petrarch—a Petrarch who can be understood “globally,” so to speak, in both his Latin and vernacular writings.

Call for Papers

Adaptation: Literature, Film, and Culture Area

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

45th Annual Conference, February 21-24, 2024

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

http://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open on September 1, 2023

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2023

We are seeking participants for this seminar at the ACLA meeting in Montreal, March 14-17. Please submit proposals at https://www.acla.org/node/42839

ACLA Annual Meeting: Montréal, March 14-17 2024

The act of literary reading implies a commitment to the text, which means making ourselves available and open to its potential and consequences. Indeed, many texts require us to devote careful attention to them and to adopt a ‘vulnerable reading’ stance even though they escape our horizon of meaning. What are difficult texts and how can they be felt as such?

This seminar focuses on the recent (2022) publication of Catherine Malabou’s Au voleur!, which is slated for publication in English translation as Stop Thief! in January 2024. Contributors are invited to present 20-minute responses to Malabou’s book that consider the interdisciplinary relevance of Stop Thief! to contemporary theoretical discourse.  

This call for papers is for a seminar at the ACLA 2024 Annual Meeting (https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting). Therefore, please submit your abstracts through this page: https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper

University of Toronto Quarterly (UTQ) is currently seeking submissions. Established in 1931, UTQ publishes innovative and exemplary scholarship from all areas in the humanities. The journal welcomes articles, in English or French, on art and visual culture, gender and sexuality, history, literature and literary studies, music, philosophy, theory, theatre and performance, religion, and other areas of the humanities not listed here. As an interdisciplinary journal, UTQ favours articles that appeal to a scholarly readership beyond the specialists of a given discipline or field.

Organizers: Daimys Garcia (dagarcia@wooster.edu), Jorge Cartaya (jec454@cornell.edu), Ana Luszczynska (luszczyn@fiu.edu)

Seminar: The Politics of Legibility, Lateness, Liberation

Deadline: September 30, 2023 at 11:59PM PST

Submission link: https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper

Hortense Spillers describes the Black woman as “a locus of confounded identities”: “‘Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’ God's ‘Holy Fool,’ a ‘Miss Ebony First,’ or ‘Black Woman at the Podium.’”[1] Borrowing Nicole Fleetwood’s term “excess flesh”[2] which refers to the hypervisibility of Black female bodies, this panel seeks to engage with the representation of bodies that are seen as “excess” or “surplus.” Fleetwood explores artists and performers that reclaim or subvert the attributed “excessiveness” of the Black female body using this very corporeality to (re)gain ownership of Black female subjectivity and narrativization.