Voice, Tone, and Affect in US Literature and (Popular) Culture

Special Issue in the European Journal of American Studies

Editors: Annika Schadewaldt, Stefan Schubert, Ulla Stackmann

The covid-19 pandemic not only sparked conversations on the gendered division of household chores and care but also brought to light the paradox of the “essential-worker.” Despite being deemed “essential” to society, these workers-often women, immigrants, and people of color were paid low wages and treated as expendable. However, amidst these challenges, the pandemic also catalyzed the expansion of alternative labor forms and care networks, beyond capitalist economies and social relations.

Please consider submitting a proposal for our third edition of “American Afterlives” @ the 52nd annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, February 17-18, 2025 (virtual) and February 20-22, 2025 (in person).

The LCLC seeks submissions for “American Afterlives,” a dedicated panel stream that crosses the pre-1900/post-1900 divide. Presentations will focus on ways of rethinking the chronologies by which we structure stories and studies about American literature and culture. Previous panels and papers have focused on aesthetic experiments and traditions, remediations of early American texts, speculative and historical fiction, cultural histories of technology, and more.

"American Dreams, American Nightmares, American Fantasies"

University of Alicante (Spain)

8-10 April, 2025

Proposed submissions are requested for an edited collection of chapters, tentatively titled Illness and Dis/ability in Southern Women’s Literature.

In the present era marked by a pressing need for sustainable coexistence with the natural world, the centrality of human beings has taken a back seat to make way for integral ontological inquiries into nature, its components and inhabitants and the manifold relationship between them. The “self-organizing powers of non-human processes” have been emphasized in academia and the dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics have been explored.

Canadian Journal of Film Studies 
Call for Papers
Special Issue: Barbenheimer

(Version française ci-bas)

In the age of technological revolution, the changes brought by AI are reshaping various facets of society, including how we approach education in the Humanities. In the context of college composition, communication, English literature and other humanities subject classes, AI is revolutionizing writing pedagogy and practice. AI-assisted writing tools and large language models (LLMs) present new challenges and opportunities, creating what Sundvall describes as a “technological problematic” in the composition classroom, which revolutionizes some traditional writing processes and practices we’ve been using for a long time.

While graduate school has long been a space for cultivating generations of academics, researchers, and intellectuals, it has never been exempt from the dynamics of power that underlie the workings of the University. Recent strides at improving equity, diversity, and inclusion in graduate school—for example in the form of the rise in number of sociopolitically- and culturally-cognizant programs, the push towards increasing international student populations, and the rise of grassroots movements such as labour unions to improve representation—belie the reality that universities remain set up according to ideological lines that facilitate the success of some graduate students while (re)producing the inequities experienced by others.

“Invisible Secrets in Pre-1865 American Literature” (SAMLA) Recent scholarly approaches in antebellum American literature emphasizes the role of secrets and secrecy, as in Dominick Mastroianni’s Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature (2022); essays on secrecy in Emily Dickinson’s poetry (Jeffrey Simons, Paul Scott Derrick, 2011); and the secret lives of nineteenth-century literature (Harper, Dickinson, Melville, 2022) in digital media, as Kayla Shipp has argued. This panel explores the way that unstated ideas, points, or secrets are exchanged in antebellum American literature.

The fields of medical and health humanities often aim to intervene in socially embedded systems of care and advance health justice. This roundtable explores ways to work toward that goal through pedagogy, research, and community partnership.

With the changing social realities alongside rapid innovation in science and technology, there is a sharp paradigm shift in academia in terms of research, especially in humanities. This shift can be considered a radical change in the core concepts. It is imperative to absorb the very meaning of paradigm shift. The term paradigm shift was coined by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in the context of revolutions in natural science. What is remarkable about Khun’s thought process is that in his book, Kuhn propounded the idea that theories have a social character and approaches them as social constructions that contain historical traces of the time and place in which they were generated.

Speculative fiction creators regularly interrogate the question of who/what is entitled to human rights. As the created, grown, augmented, and manufactured beings of imagination become more sentient, is it ethical to maintain them as labor-saving devices or will they start to become entitled to, or even demand, rights? Is there a Posthuman Rights Movement in our future or a post “human rights” movement? How will this movement accommodate already-existing arguments for the rights of non-human beings, such as the rights of animals, corporations, and even fetuses, while accounting for humans who are not entitled to human rights? Does one need a human-ish form to deserve rights including around one’s labor?

This roundtable session will discuss mindfulness practices that instructors of writing and literature can incorporate into classrooms, and it will focus especially on the implications of mindfulness for the humanities and for its/their roles in education and society in honoring human, cultural, and global diversity in all its dimensions, enacting equity and inclusivity, and affecting change.