Organizers: Madeleine Reddon (Loyola University Chicago) and Jeff Noh (Clark University)

ACLA 2023

Seminar: Oral Literature and Its Digital Forms

In recent decades, human rights have risen to prominence as a “dominant discourse for addressing issues of social justice” (Swanson Goldberg and Schultheis Moore 2012, 4). Scholars have demonstrated (and interrogated) the role that literature has played in human rights’ ascension–from the novel’s progressive expansion of the category of the “human” (Hunt 2007), to the widespread (albeit compromised) liberal belief that conveying narratives of suffering to concerned publics can promote justice (Schaffer and Smith 2004), to the evidence that “human rights bestsellers” shore up American militarism and neoliberal imperialism (Anker 2012). 

Mapping the Impossible is an open-access student journal publishing peer-reviewed research into fantasy and the fantastic. We welcome submissions from undergraduate and postgraduate students (and from those who have graduated within the last year) from any higher education institution. We publish articles on any aspect of fantasy and the fantastic and any work within this transmedial genre.

We are currently open to submissions for our special issue entitled ‘Fantasy Across Media’, matching the theme of GIFCon 2022.

Since antiquity, cities have been pivotal elements in collective and personal histories. As physical and imagined spaces, they have fostered narratives of grandeur and downfall, center and periphery, democracy and imperialism, temporality and spirituality.

The conception and depiction of the city have evolved across time and space, providing different models of social and cultural relations, influencing aesthetic conventions, and generating particular emotions and values, often in contrast with other geographic settings or forms of communal living.

Catherine Malabou places her signature concept of “plasticity” within the material encounters between the Kantian, Hegelian, and Derridean threads of the continental philosophical tradition and emerging developments in neuroscience, epigenesis, and political organization. Her recent work has demonstrated the relevance of these encounters to fields as diverse as trauma studies, gender and queer studies, hermeneutics, anarchism, postcolonialism, artificial intelligence, evolution, anthropogenic climate change, sexuality, and affect studies, to name just a few.

It is a commonly adopted procedure within postcolonial studies to situate literary objects of the colony in relation to the cultural heritage of the colonizer. Whether read under the “writing back” rubric, or as instances of “hybridity” and “creolization,” postcolonial texts are commonly conceived in terms of an exchange taking place between center and periphery. But recent work on “the global cold war” (Westad 2005) promises to overturn conventional protocol. As a result of this paradigm, we have begun to view the postwar years as characterized by a global contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Hello from Nanditha Narayanamoorthy and Yvonne Eadon, postdoctoral research scholars from the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC Chapel Hill. We are looking to convene a 6-paper panel for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Studies Interest Group at the International Communication Association (ICA) 2023 in Toronto. 

2023 marks the 400th anniversary of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known as the First Folio, published in 1623. It included 36 plays, some of which had not been published before. On the website of The Folger Shakespeare Library readers are invited to “learn more about Shakespeare’s language, life, and the world he knew,” suggesting that we might be able to unlock, or at least better understand, Shakespeare’s works by studying what he and his contemporaries not only read but also saw or heard.

International conference

“Challenging Categories” – 12-13 October 2023

CLIMAS UR 4196 - Université Bordeaux Montaigne

Call for Papers: Mapping the Impossible, Special Issue ‘Fantasy Across Media’

Extended submission deadline: 13 November 2022

Mapping the Impossible is an open-access student journal publishing peer-reviewed early-career research into fantasy and the fantastic.

For more information about the journal and submissions click here>>

https://fantasy-research.gla.ac.uk/index.php/submissions/

Aims and Scope

Rethinking Europe in the Contemporary Novel: Between the Regional and the Global

American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting (Chicago, March 16-19, 2023)

Call for Participation: Researchers, Arts Practitioners, and Activists

Winter Symposium : Reading Gerald of Wales Topographia Hibernica (1188) and Itinerarium Cambriae (1191)

The newly established Nordic Summer University study circle Praxis of Social Imaginaries: Cosmologies, Othering and Liminality invite all who are interested in joining our group to investigate the praxis of reading together, the praxis of listening and the praxis of telling stories.

We would like to draw colleagues' attention to our seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association's (ACLA’s) 2023 conference, "Narratives of Post-Viral Syndromes: Thinking the Past, Present, and Future". Anyone interested in presenting a paper at this seminar is requested to formally apply through the ACLA’s website between October 1 and October 31 (https://www.acla.org/narratives-post-viral-syndromes-thinking-past-present-and-future)