Margaret Fuller SocietyAmerican Literature Association ConferenceBoston, July 7–11, 2021EXTENDED DEADLINE: Proposals due February 23, 2021

Women in the Nineteenth Century—Traveling, Writing, Speaking

Please come join us at the American Literature Association Conference in Boston, MA, from July 7-11, 2021 where the Kurt Vonnegut Society will hold two academic sessions and host a business meeting. The ALA has made accommodations for distant-presentation, so we welcome those who may only appear digitally.

Here’s the Call for Papers.  Proposals are due by February 1, 2021.  Since the ALA has pushed the conference back to July, we have extended the deadline for proposals to February 20, 2021.

Panel 1:  Vonnegut and Religion

118th Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Las Vegas and Online (Thursday, November 11 to Sunday, November 14, 2021) 

For a special double issue to be published in March, 2022. 

Papers addressing the plurality of religious cultures in the nineteenth century, including not only Catholicism, Anglicanism, Protestantism, and Judaism, but also Buddhism, Hermeticism,  Native American Religions, Theosophy, Unitarianism, the LDS Church, African-American religion, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, Shakerism, etc., competing and overlapping in nineteenth-century contexts. Papers are welcome in all the arts; incuding literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, liturgy, the textile arts, the decorative arts, music, and dance. 

Illustrations, both color and black-and-white, are encouraged. 

The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, a peer-reviewed academic journal edited by graduate students at the University of Iowa and dedicated to publishing cultural studies scholarship from both established and emerging scholars, is currently soliciting book reviews for our upcoming issue: Justice Framed. Reviewers must be post-comprehensive exam scholars, and reviews must not be previously published elsewhere. The deadline for reviews is April 1, 2021.

We are particularly interested in reviews of the following texts:

Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America by Brigitte Fielder (Duke University Press, 2020)

2020 marks the centennial celebration of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise. Because a centennial is also a time to look back in order to reevaluate, reassess and then speculate on the future, we invite scholars to explore and analyze not only the lasting significance of Fitzgerald's oeuvre, but also the many possible parallels and/or tensions between his work and that of other writers and artists. Essays that turn to new perspectives and expand upon connections between Fitzgerald’s work and other literary and artistic expressions are also especially welcome.

Topics may include (but are not limited) to:

I'm seeking abstracts of 250 words due March 7, 2021 for an edited collection under contract with an academic publisher entitled "Women Writing Trauma in Literature."  The book considers literary representations of trauma by women writers. Rather than focusing on one time period or nationality, this collection considers a global range of women’s experiences with or depictions of traumatic encounters in literature. In particular, this book examines the relationship between trauma, identity, and literary form. Send abstracts to laura.leigh.alexander@gmail.com. Notification of accepted essays by April 1, 2021. Completed chapters (4000-6000 words) due by July 2021. 

Is drag separable from gender? A preponderance of self-described "drag things" (versus drag kings and queens) specializing in performances of non-human entities and appearing everywhere from stages in local gay bars to digital platforms like Instagram and YouTube would suggest so; however, when we speak of drag in academic literature, we hew closely to notions of drag as demonstrating gender performativity above all else. This collection therefore seeks to theorize a previously underrepresented form of drag performance that does not necessarily play with gender so much as it plays with humanness:We call this "posthuman drag."

DEADLINE EXTENDED

Call for Abstracts

(convocatoria en español abajo) 

The international conference “Camps, (In)justice, and Solidarity in the Americas: Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps” will take place January 28-31, 2022 at the University of Graz, Austria. The Department of English in the College of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras and the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz will co-sponsor the conference. The conference organizers anticipate a situation in which the current pandemic will have subsided and international travel will be safe. 

For its American Literature Association panel, the Robert Frost Society seeks papers offering fresh insights into the writing and life of Robert Frost.  All paper topics will be considered.

The deadline for proposals is now February 21, 2021.

Please send proposals to Daniel Toomey at dtoomey@landmark.edu

The American Literature Association 32nd Annual Conference will be held July 7 to July 11, 2021 at Westin Cople Place, 10 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02116.

118th Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association Conference
Thursday, November 11, 2021 to Sunday, November 14, 2021
Virtual and In-Person Panels, Sahara Las Vegas Hotel
Hosted by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

PAMLA’s Autobiography panel is currently accepting submissions for virtual and in-person sessions!

MLA '22 will be held 6–9 January, 2022 in Washington, DC. We invite abstracts for an ASLE-sponsored panel. 

The recent “affective turn” derives from a Spinozist interpretation and complication of the dualist mind-body binary. The mind’s power to think is intimately entangled with and correlated to the body’s power to act. Affect refers to the body’s capacity to affect and be affected, to its sensitivity and connection to other bodies. Recent interpretations of affect link it to everyday modes of production, circulation, and consumption as well. For example, for Sara Ahmed affects, just like emotions, “stick” as they circulate between bodies and thus produce subjectivities that disrupt or reconfigure a status quo.

Coined by Cedric J. Robinson in his magnum opus Black Marxism (1983), the term “racial capitalism” refers to the simultaneous and interdependent rise of global capitalism and racial classification and stratification. Robinson’s principal goal is to identify a tradition of radical thought and practice among Black intellectuals and activists in sites of colonial exploitation. He therefore decenters Marxist history by shifting our attention away from metropolitan Europe as a site of political radicalization. Black Marxism begins, however, in the European Middle Ages, which in Robinson’s view gave rise both to modern myths of whiteness and to the racialization of the proletariat.