CFP: Literature and Popular Culture – Northeast Popular & American Culture Association

The Literature and Popular Culture area for the 2023 Northeast Popular & American Culture Association conference is accepting paper and panel proposals from faculty and graduate students. NEPCA’s 2023 virtual annual conference will be held from Thursday, October 12-Saturday, October 14, 2023.  More information on the conference can be found here: https://nepca.blog/2023-annual-conference/

250-word abstracts are due by August 1, 2023.

A professional career in the academy is perceived as a desirable, if not the only, outcome of doctoral study. Many students in the humanities are, however, keen to leverage the skills they acquire during graduate study to identify and apply to jobs in the creative and cultural industries. Lately, even students who are determined to become academics have been forced to reevaluate their plans owing to lack of adequate faculty positions for recent PhDs in academia and systematic attacks on pay as well as working conditions. Falling enrollment in the humanities has exacerbated precarity in the form of a below-inflation pay rise and increased casualization.

Many graduate students within the broader humanities and social sciences want to pursue a teaching career either inside or outside the boundaries of higher education. As such, the time they spend working as teaching assistants and instructors of record in the college classroom constitutes valuable experience to them in many ways. In the absence of insufficient pedagogical resources and curricular training, the processes of developing and creating original courses and assignments aside from working through classroom management issues become difficult for graduate students.

Educational commitments to anti-oppressive practices and transformative pedagogies are under fire as we witness the escalation of neoliberal political interventions into higher educational institutions. Many of us work to create more inclusive understandings of the classroom community and challenge our students to engage in difficult conversations at the same time that “anti-woke” legislation and conservative politicians promote hegemonic views of the higher education classroom and privilege certain communities. Unlearning and challenging systems of power, as bell hooks notes, are important aims in transformative pedagogies that encourage critical thinking and responsible engagement with learning.

Gothic Nature is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that engages with the Gothic conceptions of, and relationship to, the natural world. For the TV and film review section of its fifth issue, the journal seeks reviews for ecoGothic television series and films released in the last 1-2 years. Additionally, Issue V of the journal is a Special Issue with a focus on decolonizing the ecoGothic. As such, older television and films with this particular focus will also be considered.

The Eudora Welty Society welcomes proposals for papers for a special session (traditional format) addressing representations of children, childhood, or childness in Welty’s fiction, nonfiction, and/or photography. Considering relationships of such representations to the conference theme of in/security is especially welcome, though not required. Please submit a 300-word abstract and brief biographical statement by July 7 to Katherine Henninger at Louisiana State University, kth@lsu.edu.

Critical Stages/Scènes critiques

www.critical-stages.org

International Association of Theatre CriticsAssociation internationale des critiques de théâtre
27, rue Beaunier, 75014 Paris,Francewww.aict-iatc.org

ISSN 2409-7411

Contact, Conflict, Concord between Europe and the Middle East in the Middle Ages

October 13, 3:00 pm Central

Online via Zoom

Interactions between the Latin West and the Islamic World in the Middle Ages present myriad opportunities to explore contact, conflict, and concord. From literature to science, these cultures intertwined through the centuries. This session invites proposals that explore aspects of contact between Europe and the Middle East from any discipline of medieval studies. To submit, please send a proposal of no more than 300 words to Libby Escobedo, escobedo@aurora.edu by August 15.

This panel will bring together scholars interested in the intersection of gender studies and young adult literature, investigating this surplus of surplus characters as authors scramble to include LGBTQ+ perspectives in their work. What is the effect of this surplus nature on the reader, whether queer or not, and how can writers avoid this cursory diversity in their own writing. The counter-example is the authors that manage to successfully write queer characters in contemporary Young Adult Fiction. How do these two sides of the coin impact a reader as they see queer characters presented as supplemental versus central?

In the past six months, the world has been shocked by the rapid progression of AI, specifically as manifested in ChatGPT, which propelled fears ranging from the integrity of education to the prospect of massive loss of jobs, to even the very end of writing. While much remains to be seen about the effect of AI on our daily lives, it is clear that we are on the verge of a paradigm shift in human culture, rooted in the impossibility to distinguish between human- and AI-generated text, images, and art. Discourses about originality in language and the formative power of language have been spun from the beginning of documented history, as evident in The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Tao De Ching,  Plato, Aristotle, The Bible, etc.

Virginia Woolf & Ecologies II
Fall Symposium on Virginia Woolf
October 20th – 22nd, 2023
On Zoom
https://v-woolf-society.com/virginia-woolf-ecologies-ii-cfp/

Ecology (noun): ecol·​o·​gy |  \ i-ˈkä-lə-jēn. 

plural ecologies

1a: The branch of biology that deals with the relationships between living organisms and their environment. Also: the relationships themselves, esp. those of a specified organism.

1c: In extended use: the interrelationship between any system and its environment; the product of this.

The Review of English and American Literature

Call for Papers

Literature of Contagion: The Representation of Epidemics in the Contemporary World

Special Session: SAMLA Conference (November 9-11, 2023 in Atlanta, GA)

Revolution, war, and protest permeate Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history. From independence in 1948 to thepresent day, Sri Lanka’s political, cultural, and everyday life has been perpetually mired in conflicts arising from ethnic, class, religious, linguistic, and social divisions. This volume, edited by Dinidu Karunanayake andNalin Jayasena, seeks submissions that attend to critical discussions of these areas.