Critical Companions to Popular Directors SERIES

NeMLA Annual Convention

11-14 March, 2021

Philadelphia, PA

Fans demonstrate a broad interest in the past, both of their objects of fandom and their own communities. They collect, catalog, preserve, restore, and publicly display historical artifacts and information in their own archives and museums. They study archival materials and collections, interview witnesses, and read historical scholarship, developing historical narratives and theses. Their research materializes in the form of analog and digital nonfiction media such as print and online publications, documentaries, podcasts, video tutorials, and pedagogical initiatives. Through their work, fans historicize their own fandom and tie it into broader historical questions, connecting to issues like heritage, gender, and the nation.

As of this writing, we find ourselves about ten days into international protests following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Protesters the world over have made specific calls to action: acknowledge that black lives matter, educate yourself about social and racial injustice, and change the legal system that allows these heinous acts to go unpunished. In thinking through how we in the field of educational theatre can proactively address these needs, I reminded myself that there are many artists and educators who are already deeply engaged in this work.

Call for Personal and Scholarly Essays for Edited Book: Community Through Women’s Eyes

Co-edited by Susanna Cantu Gregory, Ph.D. and Jeannine Pitas, Ph.D.

Keywords: community, faith community, adopted community, spirituality, women’s voices and experiences, intergenerational community, community entrance and departure, temporary community, online community, volunteer, activist, and literary communities.

CFP: Soviet Underground and Parallel Cinema

Proposals: 1st of August 2020

Papers due: 15th of October 2020

In the early 1980s, two moments of underground film — the so-called Parallel Cinema — emerge in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and Moscow. For the first time radical young filmmakers, painters and artists produce amateur films, mainly in 16mm, outside of Goskino’s state monopoly. While the Moscow school’s approach to film is shaped by the influence of conceptualist art, the Leningrad school, associated with “Necrorealism,” explores an expressionist and absurd cinema, circling around death, decay and horror.

Uncharted Medievalisms: Revealing the Medieval in Popular Fiction and Games (Panel)

52nd Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association

Marriott Downtown Philadelphia, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 11-14 March 2021

Paper abstracts are due by 30 September 2020

Session organized by Carl B. Sell and Michael A. Torregrossa and sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture.

This panel aims to explore the machinic metaphor in the Italian and European literary, cinematographic, and philosophical panorama of the 20th century. Since the Industrial Revolution, machines have established themselves as a crucial, pervasive, and unavoidable presence of individual life and collective existence. The disturbing and fascinating vitality of the machine has shaped all social, political, and economic relationships. Even the literary, cinematographic, and philosophical space was crossed by the new myth of the machine and met its complexity: it refused or exalted it, let itself be inspired by it, analyzed its profound meaning.

No event since the recent millennium, itself an “event” only in the sense created by expectationalism, with Y2K being a paradigmatic “non-event,” has activated apocalyptic sensibilities to the extent that COVID-19 has done.  Its impact has been global, multifarious, and multivalent.  In many places, it has impacted every area of life, and there are very few places where it has not spread: as of June 4, 2020, the only nations reporting no COVID-19 cases were various Pacific islands, Turkmenistan, and North Korea.  In distinction to previous pandemics with cultural impact, the most recent of any significance being the HIV/AIDS pandemic, COVID-19 has been swift and pervasive, without immediate association to any specific sub-population or vectors beyond the

Creating Texts, Breaking the Rules: Galdosian Narratives (at SAMLA 92) 

“The interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community. Disease emergence dramatizes the dilemma that inspires the most basic human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact.” Priscilla Ward, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke UP, 2008.

Gender and Death in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernity 

Gender and Death in the late middle ages and early modernity

Call for proposals on how the category of gender survived, disappeared or was transformed in contact with death in the late medieval and early modern period.

This panel at the 2021 NeMLA convention in Philadelphia, "Making Lit Lit: Forging Connections Between Student Experiences and Literature," will consider how to apply current pedagogical best practices to make literature and culture classes more relevant and engaging, and as a result, more fruitful.
 Presentations--which do not have to be read papers--can be on pedagogical innovations that have been researched and/or implemented in the literature and culture classroom, as well as on applied linguistics or other pedagogical studies that were not specifically on the teaching of literature and culture but could be applied to it (such as those on motivation/investment, needs analysis, TBLT, project-based learning, etc.).

The experience of growing up in Latin America for the past two centuries has been marked by constant negotiations with precarity, postcoloniality and multiple forms of violence. Numerous literary and audiovisual productions have drawn attention to this issue. In this session, we invite critical examinations of coming-of-age narratives and bildungsroman dealing with bi-cultural or multi-cultural identities, picaresque and heterodox processes of learning, non hetero-normative sexualities, as well as other alternative processes of development and growth.