The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University is pleased to announce its annual Graduate Student Conference to be held on 20th and 21st of April, 2023. This conference is a space for graduate scholars, activists, artists, and others to think through and confront colonial systems.

Our conference this year is interested in “Decolonizing Cartographies” – or, stated broadly, how do we challenge colonial regimes of knowledge and the ways they divide the world.

There is a common adage that labour is invisible in Victorian literature. From Bruce Robbins’s discussion of the servant’s spectral “hand” to Carolyn Lesjak’s claim that labour is often hidden in the Victorian novel, scholars have often asserted that labour is rarely made visible. Yet, in the Victorian period itself, as Tim Barringer suggests, certain types of labour were made increasingly visible through aesthetic means. Whether it was paintings of farmers and other agricultural workers, Ford Madox Brown’s painting “Work,” or the Great Exhibition “of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” where audiences watched printmakers and seamstresses create new pieces and engineers fine-tune machines, labour was something highly visualized.

CFP: Robert Graves and The ‘60s: “All You Need is Love”?

British writer Robert Graves (1895-1985) associated with multiple counterculture movements, including the modernist vanguard and anti-war poets, made forays into Eastern mysticism, reimagined the Classical period, contemporized ancient myths and rituals, experimented with hallucinogens, and managed to publish over 140 books, including what some might term his magnum opus, The White Goddess, an encyclopedic work he subtitled “A historic grammar of poetic myth.” Above all else, he is remembered as a poet of Love, exploring the subject across his long career in its many iterations: romantic, allegorical, ritualistic, the literary—the coupling of Poet and Muse.

*** Please note that special issue proposals for Verge: Studies in Global Asias 12.1 are due *March 20, 2023*. A previous announcement included an incorrect due date.***

Verge: Studies in Global Asias invites proposals for special issue 12.1, which will be published in Spring 2026.

CFP: 57th Annual Comparative World Literature Conference

On Digital Pasts and Futures: New Perspectives in Literature, Technoculture, and Media  

Venue: California State University, Long Beach. Mainly in person with some Zoom participation.

Dates: Wednesday and Thursday, April 19 and 20, 2023

Keynote Speaker: Cassius Adair (Assistant Professor of Media Studies, The New School), “Reverse Engineering: From Trans Tech Histories to Radical Trans Futures.”

This edited volume collects essays from those writing about the experience of reading, studying, teaching, and interpreting James Joyce. The essays form a picture of how Joyce’s writing serves its reader by reflecting dimensions of human experience.

Updated Call for Chapter contributions to proposed book on The Who’s Tommy:

See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me: Tommy, Rock Opera and Twentieth Century Britain

Edited by Keith Gildart, Christopher Weedman and Benjamin Halligan

*SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED*

Pennsylvania College English Association Annual Conference

Lackawanna College, 

501 Vine St., Scranton, PA

May 24-26, 2023

The Work of English Studies: Digital Adaptation and Expansion in the Post-Pandemic Age

Amazigh Orality in Contemporary Production

Orality, that is, the culture of the spoken word, is a central feature of Amazigh everyday life, history, and linguistics, and communal knowledge. Indeed, although Imazighen have one of the oldest writing systems in North Africa, known as Tifinagh, the latter is not associated with a body of written literature, an Amazigh literary canon. On the other hand, the Amazigh peoples have an extensive and rich oral literature that includes poetry, myths, fables, songs, proverbs, sacred rituals, and tales, which are excluded from a simple textualist notion of culture and communal identity. 

Version française (English version below)

Proposition pour un dossier spécial :

“Nouvelles Perspectives en Études Québécoises multidisciplinaires depuis l’Europe et le Reste du Globe”

Québec Studies 77 (Printemps/Été 2024)

“Les études québécoises ont [...] depuis quelques années déplacé ou multiplié leurs centres de gravité [...]”(Hauser 2022, 128)

Sidniwe Magona 2023 conference is a hybrid conference (April 12-14) intended to honor Sindiwe Magona on her 80th year. We are accepting paper proposals on Magona's work or on the work of other contemporary African women writers of fiction, peotry, drama, non-fiction. Our aim is to create discourse about creative work that can be brought into conversation with this formidable South Africa writer who writes about women's lives and women's rights, about the impact of colonialism/ apartheid and the need for decolonization, and about the challenges facing African children and families in the contemporary moment.

As a medium that conveys our acute sensitivities, longings, and struggles for justice, literature has always been responsive to human rights, namely, our political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental entitlements as rights-bearing subjects. The idea of human rights is simultaneously a political aim, a legal discourse, and a set of social, political, and legal practices. It figures in literary texts in the more recognizable form of access to justice. Writers and poets have always critically responded to injustices and violations of rights in their time and offered their reflections on the idea of justice and rights.

Symposium: The Weird Russian 19th Century 

April 28, 2023

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (via Zoom)

Organizers: Arpi Movsesian and Chloë Kitzinger (Rutgers University)

Keynote speaker: Jacob Emery (Indiana University Bloomington) 

Nuns have a presence in cinema as longstanding as the medium itself, including the 1922 horror film Haxan. 2021’s Benedetta, a controversial but successful Paul Verhoeven film, is a recent restatement of the capacity for stories about women religious, or women in vocation normally called nuns, to be the source of powerful and successful works across all conceivable genres.