Tracing its roots to a long history of philosophical discourse, identity stands as one of the most intricate and ubiquitous concepts within the large debates of human and social sciences. It is taken for granted in everyday life and assumed to be an all-inclusive determinant of empirical and virtual entities; yet, obscure when it comes to marking out its essence as a referential determinant and delineating the shaping politics of its concretizations. The ambiguity and paradox of identity stem from the contradictory dimensions it encompasses, entailing at the same time a sense of similitude yet difference, uniqueness yet commonness, and independence yet reliance.

The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for its annual Spring Academy on American Culture, Economics, Geography, History, Literature, Politics, and Religion to be held from March 24-28, 2025.

The HCA Spring Academy provides 20 international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and thoroughly discuss their ongoing Ph.D. projects. The conference offers a forum for Ph.D. candidates in which they can present their research candidly and receive valuable feedback

Editors Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Lorna Piatti-Farnell solicit proposals for a collection of scholarly essays with the working title Everyone’s an Assassin: John Wick and the Aesthetics of Violence.

Proposals are welcome on all aspects of the John Wick films and paratexts, with particular emphasis on the aestheticization of violence and worldbuilding within the John Wick universe.

Inquiries and 300-word proposals with CVs may be directed by October 31st, 2024 to lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz and Jeffrey.Weinstock@cmich.edu. 6000-word essays will then be due in late 2025.

Title: TBD, but potentials include:

• ‘Til All Are One: Gender, Sex, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity/Gender Expression (SOGIE) in Transformers

Editors (Collaborators): Elizabeth Sanders, Daniel M. Look

Description / Call for Papers:

We are soliciting chapters/articles for an edited academic book on topics relating to the Transformers franchise and gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender expression.Proposals from academics and independent scholars covering official continuity/properties, fanfiction, the fandom, and content creators will be considered. Proposals should be for new essays, not republications of previous works.

CALL FOR PAPERS Rethinking Fables in the Age of the Environmental Crisis May 22-24, 2025International conferenceUniversity of Kent, Canterbury, UK (and online)Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Vinciane Despret and Susan McHughOnce upon a time, not very long ago, many considered fables to be an anthropocentric mode of representing animals, to be avoided (Derrida 2002). It is then remarkable to see the flowering of scholarship on ‘fables’ in recent years.

Roger Corman’s Horror Movies: collected essays

edited by Sue Matheson

Part of theLexington Books Horror Studiesseries edited by Carl Sederholm

Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today, a special issue of Journal of American Drama and Theatre

Spring 2025

Submissions due December 1, 2024

Call for Papers: Collective Storytelling in the Anthropocene

Panel proposal for the 2025 conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Miami, April 2-6 2025

Organizer: Shannon Lambert, Ghent University

Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies

Special Issue Call for Abstracts: “Collaborative Worldbuilding”

From campaigns against disenfranchisement to protests against sexual and gender-based violence, feminism has historically combined dissent—against exclusion, subordination, and prevailing power structures—with a focus on the imperative for social and political transformation. This issue of Rejoinder explores the history of feminist dissent and how it has shifted through the decades, both for activists and academics. In addition to a historical focus, we seek to address contemporary manifestations of dissent within feminism, exploring who successfully forges narratives that challenge feminism’s dominant iteration(s)—and what accounts for their success.

The 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association will be held virtually, May 29 - June 1, 2025.

Seminar Description:

Conference Theme: Vulnerable Bodies in Literature and Culture (In-person/Offline)

Name of organization: Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India

Conference coordinators: Srirupa Chatterjee (Associate Professor and Chair, Dept of Liberal Arts, IITH) and Anandita Pan (Assistant Professor, Dept of Liberal Arts, IITH)

Conference dates: Feb 28 - March 1, 2025, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India

"Mind-Game" is film theorist Thomas Elsaesser's name for the wide variety of films made since the 1990s that present puzzling, complex, and/or impossible narrative devices and structures that play games with spectators' expectations for how traditional narrative films work. For familiar Hollywood examples, think Christopher Nolan (Inception) and M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense), but perhaps more emblematic are the films of David Lynch and Apichatpong Weerasethakul and cult classics like Donnie Darko and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

"The Future of the American Literary Archive" panel at NeMLA 2025 (March 6-9, Philadelphia) invites panelists to share archival discoveries in American literature while also engaging in broader methodological reflections on the state of archival research in the humanities. In the context of explaining their own archival work and/or pedagogy, panelists will discuss how archival research has been impacted—for better or for worse—by tectonic shifts in the US humanities landscape including technological developments (AI, digitization), declining undergraduate humanities enrollments, and calls for more public-facing humanities scholarship readable to a general audience.