Messengers from the Stars: On Science Fiction and Fantasy

No. 6, 2021

Edited by: Elana Gomel

Co-edited by: João Félix

Messengers from the Stars is an international, peer-reviewed journal, offering academic articles, reviews, and providing an outlet for a wide range of creative work inspired by science fiction and fantasy. The 2021 issue will be dedicated to the following theme:

Pandemics

In June 1906, James Joyce wrote to his publisher Grant Richards, who suggested changes to Dubliners for mitigating the text’s supposed ‘indecency’, “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.” Joyce’s metaphor recalls the popular Wildean aphorism, first published in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban at seeing his own face in a glass.

27-28 November 2021 - London/Onlineorganised byLondon Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

The Latchkey: A Journal of New Woman Studies is soliciting articles, book reviews, short essays on teaching resources, and brief biographical sketches of New Woman writers and cultural figures.

A peer-reviewed and open-access online journal, The Latchkey seeks a balance between established and emerging scholars devoted to current and innovative scholarship on the concept of the New Woman, the lives and writing of New Women authors and figures, representations of the New Woman in culture and society, sports and travel, and fin-de-siecle proto-feminism.

When Serena Williams wore a ‘catsuit’ during the 2018 French Open, this choice of clothing was banned because it allegedly showed a lack of “respect” for the game of tennis. The decision, and the overall incident, caused an uproar that went well beyond the world of sports, with many commentators criticizing the ban as a punishment directly aimed at policing women’s bodies.

An extraordinary nineteenth-century American woman, Julia Ward Howe was a courageous abolitionist, suffragist, pacifist, poet, public speaker, and founder of many organizations whose purpose was the intellectual and political advancement of women.  To acknowledge and examine this notable woman’s increasingly complicated and fraught legacy a one-day symposium will be held at Boston University’s College of General Studies (CGS) on June 11, 2022, and includes a luncheon with a keynote address by Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer and historian, Megan Marshall.

The symposium is co-sponsored by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society, Boston University’s College of General Studies (CGS), and CGS’s Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning.

Realism, which had played an important role in the literary output of the era of decolonization, is now often cast as outmoded, especially in comparison to post/modernism and impugned as insufficient to represent the current crisis. Mark Fisher and Amitav Ghosh are two of the most recent, widely read critics who maintain realism is incapable to address the politics of our times. Others, pointing to Lukács’ classical definition of realism as specific to bourgeois culture, argue that it is an inherently conservatism form, able only to depict the status quo, but incapable of imagining alternative frameworks for thinking about the world in an era of increased globalization and climate crisis.

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a session at the annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, to be held February 24-26, 2022. We seek abstracts concerning the relationship between avant-garde American poetics and spirituality, religion, and/or other mystical influences. The connection between experimental verse and spiritual traditions relates directly to Charles Olson’s poetry and to the poetry of many other important post-1945 figures. While Olson’s early poetry is often lauded for its materialist concerns, his later poetics has, at times, been dismissed for what poet Jack Clarke once called “the kook strain,” a line of thinking that grew increasingly esoteric, mystical, and gnostic.

CfP: ArtsPraxis Volume 8, Issue 2

ISSN: 1552-5236

ArtsPraxisVolume 8, Issue 2 looks to engage members of the global Educational Theatre community in dialogue around current research and practice. We welcome traditional academic research as well as narratives of practice. This call for papers is released in concert with the publication of ArtsPraxis Volume 8, Issue 1. The submission deadline for Volume 8, Issue 2 is September 1, 2021.

       Call for Papers

Twentieth Claflin University Conference on English and Language Arts Pedagogy in Secondary and Postsecondary Institutions (Virtual)

October 27-28, 2021

THEME: READING AND WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM:  

DIGITAL LITERACIES, EQUITY, AND ACCESS

Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2021                                                                              

Concurrent sessions (webinars on Zoom)

According to the renown essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, published in 1975 by the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, hegemonic cinema has privileged the masculine gaze, objectifying female bodies on the screen and transforming them in mere objects of desire for the male spectator. Mulvey studies the way female bodies have been exposed in cinema to evoque ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ while becoming the object of the masculine scopophilic gaze within the screen.

It has been more than two decades since Ashraf Rushdy published his genre-defining analysis of neo-slave narratives, which argues that literary artists of the 1960s and 70s became interested in creating fictionalized versions of antebellum slave narratives in order to articulate new understandings of Black political subjectivity that developed during the civil rights era. In the decades following the book’s publication, we have seen a surge of antiracist literature and activism aimed at addressing deadly police violence, mass incarceration, and ongoing discrimination in employment, education, healthcare, and housing opportunities for African-American people.

(Narrating)  Environmental  Displacements:

The Center for Medieval-Renaissance Studies of the University of Virginia's College at Wise announces

Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXIV, September 16-18, 2021

Keynote Address

                                                                                                                            Elizabeth Rhodes

                                                                                                                              Boston College