The year between December 29th 2022 and December 29th 2023 would have been the hundredth of William Gaddis’ life. Between 1955, when he published The Recognitions, and 1998, when he died shortly after completing Agapē Agape, Gaddis was notorious for a disproportion between reputation and readership. Being reflexively labelled “difficult,” with his own novels’ wry figurations of characters writing “for a very small audience,” and with a tendency to be categorized (though not always actually read) alongside the increasingly unfashionable “high postmodernists”… all this might have made it hard to envisage his work surviving into the 2000s.

In times of crisis—war, pandemic, severe disruptions of supply chains, climate apocalypse, systemic erasure of reproductive autonomy—there might seem to be no meaningful distinction between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Yet after the cultural emphasis on catastrophe in the last few years, a return to the ordinary is overdue. What role can critical thought on ordinary language, affect, and aesthetics now play in interrogating the evolving concept of ordinariness, imagining alternative ordinaries, and expanding our geographies and objects of study? Additionally, what are the limits of critical theory for understanding and communicating about ordinary experience?

Journal Special Issue “Radioactive Empires: The Nuclear Relations of Coloniality.” 

Editors: Rebecca Macklin, Laura De Vos, Sonja Dobroski, and Susanne Ferwerda

Abstracts due: February 15, 2023
Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2023

Full articles due: 15 September 2023

The Graduate Student Representative for the Modernist Studies Association seeks paper proposals from graduate students and emerging scholars on the topic of “precarious modernisms” for a guaranteed MSA 2023 panel. In a rapidly shifting climate of academic precarity, what can modernism’s own precarities offer in the way of addressing our contemporary crises of the humanities? Panelists might consider, but are certainly not limited to:

Call for Proposals:

Humor and Conflict in the Digital Age Conference

29-30 November 2023

Ghent University, Belgium

Humor and Conflict in the Digital Age (HACIDA), an ENLIGHT Scientific Research Network at Ghent University, welcomes proposals for 20-minute presentations as part of a two-day conference in Ghent, Belgium.

Call for Submissions

The acceleration of diverse and converging crises—climate disaster and apartheid, environmental racism and resurgent ecofascism, ecocide and land grabbing—reinforce that environmental violence has become an unmistakable feature of contemporary life. Edge Effects seeks submissions that ask how violence is enacted through, for, and on environmental spaces, including land, water, and air. 

The Twenty Seventh Annual Conference of the
Arab-US Association for Communication Educators (AUSACE)

Kuwait University, Kuwait

28-30 October 2023

THEME: Changing Media Landscapes: Convergence and Fragmentation

Media platforms have developed at an unprecedented rate recently, disrupting traditional
models for publishing, broadcasting, and advertising and creating a need for identifying new
models. As media become more fragmented and at the same time converge, implications can be
seen across several different areas, such as the way people access media, how media are
marketed, and how the media industry is changing.

We would like to invite humanities and social science scholars to contribute to our edited volume, ‘Oceans Seas and Shorelines in Film’, to be published in 2024/25 by Routledge in the Oceans Seas and Shorelines: a natural and cultural environmental history series.

Film is the most influential of all of the cultural media, combining powerful audio and visual formulas to recreate the world for the purpose of telling a story. It implicitly and explicitly conveys important aspects of real and imagined social change and exchange within a variety of environmental contexts, but the role of the environment and the impact of human agency on the environment has rarely been a focus of critical enquiry. 

Since their inception dating back to as early as 1829, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have continuously represented the notion of possibility and hope for African Americans. As an initial action, these organizations emphasized the educational improvement of Blacks at the elementary and secondary levels. Since the creation of the first HBCU, these institutions of academic excellence have transformed exclusively into postsecondary institutions, ultimately forming a network where thousands of African descendants could obtain an education that they otherwise could not afford due to years of educational suppression and segregation in higher education.

Bob Dylan's Blues: Blues Poetics and American Memory I am seeking  abstracts between 200-400 words for a panel on Dylan's incorporation, use, and revision of blues music especially in the context of theorists of blues poetics such as Houston Baker, Angela Davis, and Fred Moten. Most existing scholarship on Dylan's use of blues music remains informed by the work of writers and critics such as Sam Charters, Michael Gray, Greil Marcus, and Alan Lomax. This work often favors a conceptualization of the blues as a distant,  pre-modern source of "authentic" soundings.

    What is DiCon?

Diverge: to separate. Converge: to meet. In mathematical terms, the prefix marks the difference between infinity and defined. The Literature and Writing Studies department at California State University, San Marcos seeks papers and creative works that expand, transgress, problematize, and rethink hegemonic boundaries and definitions. 

The Gaskell Journal seeks a new Reviews Editor. As well as publishing peer-reviewed articles, this annually produced academic journal features 2-4 book reviews, of works focused on Elizabeth Gaskell but also on Victorian literature and culture more generally. The reviews editor’s role is to identify suitable books for review, contact publishers to request a complimentary review copy, and appoint appropriate reviewers. As well as engaging with our regular reviewers, this also involves making new contacts in relevant scholarly fields. The reviews editor must then keep in contact with the reviewer to ensure that the review is completed in good time, and meets house requirements, before forwarding it to the journal editors.

The next Film-Philosophy Conference will take place physically on campus at Chapman University, California, USA. 

This year’s event will feature a special screening of Marlon Fuentes’s critically acclaimed film Bontoc Eulogy (1995) followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker.

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

August Wilson in Context

Edited by Khalid Y. Long and Isaiah Matthew Wooden