Henry James scholarship has hesitated to engage with the challenges and opportunities presented by the rich and proliferating constellation of thought that is Trans Studies. How might the question of transgender revise, reinvigorate or transform our understanding of James’s writing, and / or of James as a biographical subject?

We welcome proposals addressing any aspect of the topic. Possible approaches might include:

-          Transgender subjects in James’s fictional worlds and nonfiction texts

-          Transgender and subjectless queer critique

-          Sex, gender, and narration

-          Transgender and sexuality

-          Transgender and sibling relationships

            Marx and Engels famously use the term lumpenproletariat to describe “that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society.” The concept suggests that the most marginal are not part of the revolutionary class but are in fact more likely to function as a “bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” As Raphael Samuel noted, the word came to function as an “unproblematic term of abuse” in early twentieth-century Communist discourse, suggesting a relation between political unreliability and moral failings. The precarious were not merely represented as a threat to radical movements but as personally contemptible in ways that drew on conservative ideas of the undeserving poor.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Women and music in the early modern age  

Queluz National Palace

July 2nd - 4th, 2021

Organization:

Divino Sospiro – Centro de Estudos Musicais Setecentistas de Portugal 

Scientific Committee:

Cristina Fernandes, Giuseppina Raggi, Iskrena Yordanova,

Ricardo Bernardes, José Camões, Francesco Cotticelli, Paologiovanni Maione

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. 

Our website: https://www.postmemory.info/

Scientific Committee:

Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland

Professor Polina Golovátina-Mora - Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Colombia)

​We are happy to announce that the KEYNOTE SPEAKERS at our 2nd "Postmemory and the Contemporary World", 25-26 February 2021 will be Marianne Hirsch and Mirta Kupferminc.

 CFP:

"Crossroads: The Risks of Making Choices"

Virtural Conference: April 16th-17th

"Each decision we make closes off a series of possible alternatives. What happens if we try to make several contradictory decisions at once and keep them separate, in open series? A political life, an academic life, an emotional life, family life, sexual, religious, all of which may have diffuse (not to say clandestine) relationships between them" Ricardo Piglia, The Way Out (258)       

Cornell EGSO 2021 Conference: Vulnerability

DEADLINE EXTENDED: February 15, 2021

Virtual Conference April 16th - 17th, 2021 

Call For Proposals:

Call For Papers – ReFocus: The Films of David Mamet

We are seeking abstracts of 250-500 words for essays to be included in a book-length anthology on David Mamet to appear in late 2022. We have received a number of strong proposals already, but looking for a few more to add to the volume’s lineup. The intended scope of the work is to analyze Mamet’s unique position as an artist of note in both the theatre and the cinema, as well as his very specific ideas about dramatic structure, performance style, and economical visual storytelling. It will argue, for the first time, that Mamet’s film work is an essential, but underappreciated dimension of his artistic career.