In times of crisis—war, pandemic, severe disruptions of supply chains, climate apocalypse, systemic erasure of reproductive autonomy—there might seem to be no meaningful distinction between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Yet after the cultural emphasis on catastrophe in the last few years, a return to the ordinary is overdue. What role can critical thought on ordinary language, affect, and aesthetics now play in interrogating the evolving concept of ordinariness, imagining alternative ordinaries, and expanding our geographies and objects of study? Additionally, what are the limits of critical theory for understanding and communicating about ordinary experience?

The majority of research on 19th-century literary representations of sexual violence variously restricts the field by 1) explicitly or implicitly treating rape as an exceptional crime; 2) limiting analyses to what Erin Spampinato has termed “adjudicative reading,” or legalistic approaches that evaluate rape stories as if they were real-life court cases; and 3) attending only to narratives about cisgender men’s violations of white cisgender women, especially within the middle-class home, to the exclusion of nonheterosexual, queer, and colonial contexts.

This panel explores Black geographies (both real and imagined) of joy/sorrow in African American literature, examining how geographic thought, speculation, and practice produce joys/sorrows for Black subjects and communities. Send a 200-word abstract and CV.

Dorottya Mozes, University of Debrecen

Conrad's works feature linguistic sophistication, narrative complexity, psychological nuance, subtle irony, political contestation, and historical challenge. While some might seek to avoid difficulty, this panel instead embraces difficulty and considers how precisely the most challenging aspects of Conrad's art can empower students and cultivate subtlety, humanistic and historical breadth, and even humility. This panel invites papers that consider how the multivalent difficulty of Conrad’s works — syntactic, psychological, political, or aesthetic — offers pedagogical opportunity.  Comparative approaches are welcome.

Call for Papers for Women in French

2023 Midwest Modern Language Association Convention

Cincinnati, Ohio

November 2-5, 2023

I am pleased to announce the Call for Papers for WIF at the 2023 MMLA Convention (to be held in person November 2-5 in Cincinnati, OH). We welcome proposals that relate the study of French and Francophone women authors, the study of women’s place in French and Francophone cultures or literatures, and feminist literary criticism to this year’s theme: “Going Public: What the MMLA Owes Democracy.”

Call for Submissions

The acceleration of diverse and converging crises—climate disaster and apartheid, environmental racism and resurgent ecofascism, ecocide and land grabbing—reinforce that environmental violence has become an unmistakable feature of contemporary life. Edge Effects seeks submissions that ask how violence is enacted through, for, and on environmental spaces, including land, water, and air. 

The Twenty Seventh Annual Conference of the
Arab-US Association for Communication Educators (AUSACE)

Kuwait University, Kuwait

28-30 October 2023

THEME: Changing Media Landscapes: Convergence and Fragmentation

Media platforms have developed at an unprecedented rate recently, disrupting traditional
models for publishing, broadcasting, and advertising and creating a need for identifying new
models. As media become more fragmented and at the same time converge, implications can be
seen across several different areas, such as the way people access media, how media are
marketed, and how the media industry is changing.

Recent work like George Edmondson’s The Neighboring Text or Seeta Chaganti’s Strange Footing models close engagement with medieval manuscripts that offers new modes of experiencing literature beyond the historically positivist, empirically material, or hermeneutically suspicious, either by recognizing the limitations of theoretical lenses or by approaching language beyond information. This session asks how looking at the character of the medieval text on the manuscript page–its calligraphy, titles, rubrics, initials, performance cues, polysemy–might allow us to consider anew readers’ encounters, medieval and modern, with that text.

Several recent, celebrated studies of late medieval English literature present their anchoring motivations as including one or more twenty-first century activist concerns – for example, scholarship that considers Chaucer and rape culture, examines the medieval roots or affinities of contemporary white supremacy, thinks ecocritically about the medieval beyond-human, juxtaposes medieval political events with modern ones, etc. Methodologically, such studies have involved explicit interleaving of analysis of late medieval English literary texts with considerations of texts, events, or discourses of the present.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/152gPo_1gDyss_fVMBLQoJAnl-aK5MhNJ/edi...

Call for Proposals

Writing Program Administration in the Time of COVID

Special issue of WPA: Writing Program Administration

Summer 2023, vol. 46, no. 3

Jacob Babb and Jessie Blackburn, editors

Confluences of Writing Studies and the History of the English Language

Guest editors: Chris C. Palmer, Kennesaw State University; Amanda Sladek, University of Nebraska-Kearney; & Jennifer Stone, University of Alaska Anchorage

Call for Proposals as PDF

The 15th Annual Louisiana Studies Conference will be held September 23, 2023, at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The conference committee is now accepting presentation proposals for the upcoming conference. Presentation proposals on any aspect of the 2023 conference theme “Louisiana Works,” as well as creative texts by, about, and/or for Louisiana and Louisianans, are sought for this year’s conference.

The Gaskell Journal seeks a new Reviews Editor. As well as publishing peer-reviewed articles, this annually produced academic journal features 2-4 book reviews, of works focused on Elizabeth Gaskell but also on Victorian literature and culture more generally. The reviews editor’s role is to identify suitable books for review, contact publishers to request a complimentary review copy, and appoint appropriate reviewers. As well as engaging with our regular reviewers, this also involves making new contacts in relevant scholarly fields. The reviews editor must then keep in contact with the reviewer to ensure that the review is completed in good time, and meets house requirements, before forwarding it to the journal editors.

The next Film-Philosophy Conference will take place physically on campus at Chapman University, California, USA. 

This year’s event will feature a special screening of Marlon Fuentes’s critically acclaimed film Bontoc Eulogy (1995) followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker.