The Milton Society of America invites papers considering the freedom or unfreedom of the body as a political, religious, philosophical, and artistic concept. Potential topics include reproduction, restrictions on movement, and enslavement. Please send a brief abstract (approximately 200 words) and an abbreviated cv to Eric Song (esong1@swarthmore.edu) no later than March 15, 2023.

Proposals for essay chapters are invited for a collection on the fiction of nineteenth-century American author Kate Chopin with an emphasis on global perspectives. A book proposal for Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, the collection will be comprised of essays that present global approaches to teaching, reading, and/or researching Chopin’s work in contexts outside the United States. Comparisons to other authors is welcome, and emphasis on racial or class-based concerns is encouraged. Essay chapter proposals should be between 200-250 words, and include a title and short bio of the contributor. Final essays will be due at the end of 2023/beginning of 2024, and will run 20-24 double-spaced pages long.

Faculty of Foreign Languages is pleased to inform you that due to increased interest we have extended the abstract submission deadline and shall be able to accept abstracts until 15 March 2023.

Update: The submission deadline for proposals has been extended to March 31, 2023. 

The Board of Board Game Academics (BGA) is pleased to announce that we will hold our first annual academic conference. BGA is a new journal and conference dedicated to the exploration of critical issues within the distinct yet overlapping communities of tabletop board and role-playing games.

While these communities are expanding, players, creators, and scholars of tabletop board and role-playing games have traditionally been late to addressing and including diverse representations and perspectives.

Literary, theoretical, and philosophical engagements with “the everyday” have a broad, transhistorical scope—from stoic philosophy to canonical hours, or medieval books of precepts; from Locke and Kant in the eighteenth century to Wittgenstein, Austin, and the ordinary language philosophy of the early twentieth century; from Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to Toril Moi and Stanley Cavell; from considerations of the realist novel of the nineteenth century to the modernist novel of the twentieth (and beyond). 

This year, MMLA’s general call questions what the academy “owe[s] democracy,” namely how academics engage with shared truths. In keeping with the general call, the Religion and Literature permanent section invites proposals that examine how authors interrogate institutionalized systems of belief. 

Those aspiring to be on the panel should feel empowered to offer proposals that interpret the concept of religion rather loosely by potentially including the academy as an institution of belief. Maintaining a broad interpretation of religion to include all intersections of faith, folklore, belief, and literature, expressions of belief may include creeds, mottos, mission statements, the constitution, charters, manifestos, doctrines, etc. 

Title: Bodies, Bodies, Bodies: Theorizing Complex Embodiment

Conference: MLA 2024, in Philidelphia, PA, January 4th to 7th, 2024

MLA ID #: 22876

MLA Confex Link: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2024/webprogrampreliminary/Paper22876.html 

The field of narrative medicine recognizes that stories articulate the language of the body. Rita Charon, the founder of the field of narrative medicine, brought both patient and practitioner to a fuller recognition of stories as a source of medical insight and intervention: stories that may take shape in words but originate through bodily drives. Drawing lessons from psychoanalysis about “attention, drives, and relationships,” she reminded us that the nineteenth-century photographs of hysteria captured images of bodies telling stories not yet spoken.

In Passage : The International Journal of Writing and Mobility, the journal of the Department of English of the University of Boumerdes (Algeria), seeks essays in English or French for its sixth issue, to be released in December 2023. 
 
 All the contributions should either be written in English or discuss questions that relate to the English-speaking world. They should fit within the broad scope of texts and mobility and their interconnectedness in the fields of literature, linguistics, and translation, among others.

Suggested topics:

- Travel literature and intercultural contact.

- Nomadism.

- Exile in literature

-  Literary genres and movements

CALL FOR PAPERS

Reading Tolkien in the 21st Century
(7–8 September, 2023 – University of Bonn, Germany)

In his discussion of the socio-ecological crisis of capitalism, Jason Moore dismisses the theoretical tendency to describe ‘twin’ social and environmental crises, arguing that ‘these are in fact a singular process of transformation that today we call a crisis’ (2011: 136). The 2023 Territorial Bodies: World Culture in Crisis conference proposed the notion of ‘territorial bodies’ as an analytical tool for addressing the singular socio-ecological crisis further.

The Irish Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Forum invites proposals for a guaranteed roundtable at MLA 2024 (4-7 January) in Philadelphia, PA. 

This roundtable considers points of collision, comparison, and friction in the diasporic literary and cultural histories of the Global South and Ireland. How have different legacies of conquest, occupation, and resistance determined understandings of belonging to knowable communities? In turn, how have distinct practices and experiences of diaspora helped to effect specific forms of identity, affiliation, and tendency? And how have literary and cultural works served to articulate these relations into the fraught present? 

RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

66th Annual Conference

Saturday, 23 September 2023

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for our 66th Annual Conference, to be held at the University of San Diego.

CALL FOR PAPERS

How can we harness of the power of Black joy? How have Black thinkers, scholars, and artists turned their attention to forms of Black happiness as a critical and necessary affectual response to the logics of Black death? How can we describe—and make meaningful—the radical potential of Black happiness and joy as antidotes to the overwhelming logics of Black death and destruction? While keeping in view the manifold ways Black life is denigrated, devalued, and destroyed, this panel seeks to explore representations of Black bliss, tenderness, pleasure, jubilation, mirth, and exhilaration.