The Routledge handbook below is now recruiting editorial members who will each review 4-5 papers and give feedback to help enhance the quality of the paper. Their names will be shown on the title page as members of the editorial board for this handbook and each will receive a hardcopy of the book when published. 

Routledge Handbook of Descriptive Rhetorical Studies and World Languages

Editors: Weixiao Wei and James Schnell

I.          English rhetoric in the US and UK

Speakers

Professor Catherine Spooner (Lancaster University)

Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester Metropolitan University)

and featuring a Q&A and dramatic reading by Dacre Stoker

How can vampires help us heal?

In the 125th anniversary year of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this interdisciplinary project examines the continuing history of the vampire from the 19th century to the present and explores how the vampire can function as a cultural figure of recovery, community, and regeneration.

The year 2022 will mark the first centenary of the ‘annus mirabilis’ of British modernism, the year 1922, which saw the simultaneous publication of Virginia Woolf’s first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room, of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, R.M. Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.

MMLA’s permanent African American Literature section invites papers that examine the way black writers use black aesthetics in their work(s) to promote a “cultural ensemble” as Fred Moten notes. With the 2022 MMLA theme of “Post-Now,” this section is concerned with how black writers use aesthetics to shape and/or reshape the resistance that blackness brings. American Blackness, of course, begins through the resistance of the object and the irruption or interruption of personhood and subjectivity. Even through, or perhaps because of, this resistance, blackness maintains a collective being. As such, I invite works that are concerned with how black writers use: music, art, violence, movement, language, communication, sex, etc.

The 54th annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association will take place in person in Salt Lake City, June 16-18, 2022 on the theme of “Navigating Medieval Spaces: Real and Imagined.” 

The conference will be held at the University of Utah, with remote options available for those who cannot travel. In addition to regular sessions and a keynote address, events will include a plenary session highlighting some of the Marriott Library's rare books and manuscripts. We are excited to host a variety of events this year ranging from works-in-progress workshops and pedagogy panels to research presentations.  

This call is for critical essays for a proposed edited volume centering on the iconic television show The Golden Girls for Routledge’s Advances in Pop Culture series.

Carceral Shakespeare
Edited Collection, Call for Papers

Shakespeare has been in American prisons over the last forty years, in arts programs and college-in-prison classrooms. Even as the landscape of incarceration has shifted—from the War on Drugs to the Fair Sentencing Act, from prison reform to prison abolition—Shakespeare programs have endured. While attention to these programs often reduce them to methods of “reform” and “rehabilitation,” these narratives of redemption do not capture the complexity of what it means to engage with Shakespeare inside the carceral system.

Those of you in the United Kingdom might
be interested in a couple of free training
events being offered in the cities of
Leicester and Leeds. They are called
"Quantitative Methods for Literary and
Historical Scholarship -- in Theory and
Practice":

http://cts.dmu.ac.uk/events/QMLHS

Older women have traditionally been portrayed negatively in folklore, fairy tales, literature and film, for example. Images of witches, evil stepmothers, shrivelled, bitter 'spinsters', and vindictive, bullying women abusing positions of power are rife in Western culture. Yet, perhaps things are changing. A new emphasis on the need to discuss and understand the menopause seems to be at the heart of this. This conference examines historical representations of the 'crone' in relation to crime and Gothic narratives. But it also looks ahead and globally to examine other types of discourses and representations.

The Literary Encyclopedia at www.litencyc.com is looking for qualified writers to enhance its coverage of postwar and contemporary American poetry. Following is a list of poets and/or movements for whom/which we are seeking introductory essays of ca. 2500 words covering biography and historical context and giving a brief overview of relevant works. The list below is not comprehensive or final, and new proposals of writers/works/context essays that are not currently listed in our database are also welcome.

In Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Without Inspection,” an undocumented Haitian immigrant, Arnold, dies from unsafe working conditions at a construction site in south Florida. In the news coverage about the event, the construction company and developer release a statement in which he is referred to as Ernesto Fernandez, probably from the false documents Arnold offered to be hired. Danticat’s story illustrates the blending of Caribbean cultures in the U.S. South through worksites and migration processes, centering labor and labor conditions in immigrant and refugee life.

(Florida Graduate Students Only) Call for Academic and Creative Proposals

The English Graduate Student Society at Florida Atlantic University 2022 Graduate Conference: Connections 

 DEADLINE EXTENDED

Boca Raton, Florida (in person and Zoom)

April 15 and 16, 2022

Science and Literature: Posthumanism and the Post-Apocalyptic

Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST): Special Issue on Life Narratives

Guest edited by Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

Life Narratives: Self-referential Proclamations

Deadline for Full-Text Submissions: July 15, 2022

American life writing has a long tradition starting with the diaries, journals, and captivity narratives kept by Pilgrims and Puritans such as Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), to more canonized life writings such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791).