From an early stage, the modern African novel has recognized the unjust challenges faced by African women. Even novels of the 1950's, such as Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City (1954), bear witness to the difficulties that women face in transcending traditional norms as well as modern forms of objectification and exploitation. Even though these novels gesture to the need for better physical and societal realities for women, we may not find in the early novels a plan or vision of what exactly is needed for women to surmount various cultural hurdles and to fully actualize their potential in the modern realm.

Conference: International Congress of Medieval Studies, May 8-10 2025. Kalamazoo, Michigan.

AMP: American Music Perspectives seeks articles associated with Bruce Springsteen’s groundbreaking 1975 album Born to Run. The journal is open to a wide range of cultural and theoretical perspectives, as well as to essays that address the artist’s earlier work in relation to Born to Run. For best consideration, please submit your work by October 15, 2024. This special issue will be co-edited by Kenneth Womack (Monmouth University) and Carlee Migliorisi (Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music) to commemorate the album’s 50th anniversary. 

The panel "Abortion, Single Motherhood, and Adoption Schemes in Magdalene Literature" will take place at the 56th Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) organised from March 6 to March 9 in Philadelphia, PA. 

Magdalenism is a structure which was implemented from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century in about 60 European and Europeanised countries around the world. Its objective was to control and fashion femininity, women’s social behaviours, and their sexuality. At a time when abortion was illegal in most countries, Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby “Homes” were often seen as a “solution” for unmarried pregnant girls and women.

“Sketching the Spectral: Ghosts in French-language Graphic Novels”

56th Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention

Philadelphia, PA

March 6-9, 2025

 Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2024

Call for papers for the volume on Ecodramaturgies for Routledge Focus on Dramaturgy series, edited by Magda Romanska:
https://www.routledge.com/Focus-on-Dramaturgy/book-series/RFOD

Seminar 3 of European Shakespeare Research Asociation Conference in Porto, 9-12 July, 2025

Shakespeare and Music: Between Time and Timelessness

Supported by the RMA Shakespeare and Music Study Group

Convenors:

Michelle Assay, University of Toronto, Canada (michelle.assay@utoronto.ca)

Alina Bottez, University of Bucharest, Romania (alina.bottez@lls.unibuc.ro)

PoP Moves, an international network of popular dance researchers, invites proposals for a Special Topics Issue of The Journal of Popular Culture on the topic of mediating popular dance histories. For well over a century, popular dance has been present across changing media technologies: from printed instruction manuals in magazines and newspapers to radio, film, and television to digital platforms and social media, dancing has circulated between different bodies, cultural communities, and across geographical and social boundaries.

Human bodies and, by extension, human subjectivity have long been contested spaces. Against traditional Eurocentric and anthropocentric definitions of the human as a stable identity abstracted from its surrounding environment, movements like feminism, anti-racism, anti- and post-colonialism, and ecocriticism have called out the human’s complicated entrenchment in and with other/othered bodies and landscapes. Posthumanist scholars like Rosi Braidotti define the (post)human body as necessarily relational, nomadic, ever-changing with and in response to others. As such, the body becomes a site for radical transformation through which we may interrogate contemporary issues such as gender and race equity, income inequality, and climate change.

A recent New York Times article, “Are We in the ‘Anthropocene,’ the Human Age? Nope, Scientists Say,” reported on the ongoing debate among scientists about classifying the Anthropocene as an epoch or an event. Regardless of its definitive place on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene is a significant marker of history, signifying humans’ profound impact on the environment and the course of evolution. This raises critical questions about the nature of evolution in the Anthropocene. How do we define evolution in this age? The Anthropocene is characterized by human achievements and significant challenges, including wars and climate destruction. These crises force us to question: what kind of Anthropocene are we striving to preserve?

The call for papers for the next general issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (ISSN 20455852 , ONLINE ISSN 20455860) is now open. 

The deadline for submissions of full articles (5-6k words) is August 31 2024. The Journal is indexed in SCOPUS (among others), and its remit is broad and international. Please submit your articles for consideration (together with a short bio and institutional affiliation) to both Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell (lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz) and Dr Ashleigh Prosser (ashleigh.prosser@murdoch.edu.au).

With apologies for cross-posting, please consider submitting, and please share widely.

We seek proposals for the 6th edition of Race/Gender/Class/Media (Routledge). This reader contains upwards of 50 relatively short, tightly-written, good-quality research reports. We're looking for the same wide range of content as in prior editions, preferably focusing on contemporary media content.  

Bandung to Berlin explores the radical imagination of the global Cold War, the aesthetics of Non-Alignment, and the role of art in the era of decolonization. Though these topics are often treated as separate paradigms, their points of interconnection are deeply entangled. As former colonies across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean fought for and gained independence, new national agendas navigated the competing pressures of the Cold War and resisted a dichotomous world order. This conference will explore transnational artistic exchanges and cultural diplomacy in the years 1947-1989, especially across regions in the Global South. We hope to foster new conversations about the confluence of art and politics in larger cultural imaginaries. 

How are Asian American and Pacific Islander bodies figured across different media—in contemporary novels, poetry, and visual arts? How do the transits and residues of US empire across the Pacific inform these representations? This panel investigates texts that center AAPI bodies and their varying materialities, wherein racialized bodies take on other-than-human forms (i.e., paper, digital, textual, watery, earthy, animal, etc.). The panel aims to explore how these embodiments are shaped by the residual and ongoing violences of US empire and/or war in the Pacific.