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

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

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

Call for Papers

Mystery/Detective Fiction 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

This is a call for papers for the ACLA seminar titled "Ecocritical Adaptations: Feminist and Queer Interventions" organized by Dr. Fei Shi and Dr. Sylvie Bissonnette.

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Conference 
Palais des congrès, Montreal, March 14-17, 2024

Co-organizers: Christine Xiong (Stanford) and Fiana Kawane (University of British Columbia)

Édouard Glissant, in Poetics of Relation (1990), famously emphasizes that “Cultures develop in a single planetary space but to different ‘times.’ It would be impossible to determine either a real chronological order or an unquestionable hierarchical order for these times.”

What can be said about epic today? Although M.M. Bakhtin famously declared the impossibility of epic in a modern, polyphonic world in 1941, the category has remained a dynamic source of artistic and critical interest. The works considered in studies like Franco Moretti’s Modern Epic (1994), Sneharika Roy’s Postcolonial Epic (2018), or Václav Paris’s Evolutions of Modernist Epic (2021) re-evaluate epic as a multifarious category capable of shedding light on the global, postcolonial, and postmodern condition of contemporary literature—either as a site of resistance or as a form of cultural domination. Yet even in its new, polyphonic forms, the idea of epic is rarely severed completely from its classical roots.

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.  

As the concept of plasticity has travelled across feminist science studies and new materialisms to Black, queer, and trans studies, its meaning has itself become unstable—or plastic. Jules Gill-Peterson and Kyla Schuller offer an appropriately plastic definition: “plasticity refers to the capacity of a given body or system to generate new form” (1). Many feminist and queer theorists have sung the praises of plasticity, which promises to destabilize fixed forms of power relations, across the registers of gender/sex, race, and (neuro)biology (from Catherine Malabou to Karen Barad to Judith Butler).

ACLA 2024 Annual Meeting 

Oceanic Taiwan: Revisiting the Concept and Its Implications

https://www.acla.org/oceanic-taiwan-revisiting-concept-and-its-implications

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.

The Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention will be held in Boston March 7-10 2024.

"The people in those books never lived!" It's an ironic observation from Captain Beatty, which he uses to justify the burning of books in Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel turned seventy years old in 2023, yet many of the thematic elements persist today. While books are not being burned (at least not yet), book banning has certainly surged over the past few years. Indeed, the heated political climate in the United States has called for many books to be pulled from K-12 curricula, books that are oftentimes by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ folks.