CFP: 55th Annual Comparative Literature Conference

Outcasts and Outliers in Literature, Music, and Visual Arts

Wednesday and Thursday, April 7-8, 2021

The Comparative World Literature Program at California State University, Long Beach,

invites abstracts for presentations at its 55th annual conference in Long Beach,

California on the topic of Outcasts and Outliers. In accordance with university policy,

this conference will be virtual. It is the hope of the conference committee that this

We invite international PhD students and emerging scholars to come together to consider the myriad ways that our contemporary and established traditions of rhetorical theory and criticism inform global flows of meaning-making. For 2021, we have conscientiously chosen to hold the 2021 workshop in San Luis Potosí, Mexico at El Colegio de San Luis (also referred to as COLSAN), in order to gather academics, scholars, and activists who are thinking about language and communication as we stay critical of its limits and consequences. In alignment with this purpose, the working languages in 2021 will be English and Spanish with the aid of translation software and technology.

The 118th annual conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) will be held from Thursday, November 11, to Sunday, November 14, 2021, at the Sahara Las Vegas Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Strategies for Teaching Climate Change in the First-Year Writing Classroom:

This session investigates the teaching of climate change themes, focusing on the first-year writing classroom. It will invite instructors whose courses have incorporated these themes to share their pedagogical strategies with those who are new to the use of climate change themes or who would like to improve their existing pedagogy.

In The Temple (1633), George Herbert observes that “broken bones may joy,/ And tune together in a well-set song.” Here, Herbert observes the interplay between ailments that affect both the spiritual and physical senses. Senses - understood to be those faculties that acquire knowledge vis-à-vis experience - serve as a shared vocabulary informing both spiritual (i.e., transcendent, religious) and physical (i.e., materialistic, naturalistic) means of treatment. But even in our own day, such connections among theories of sense, spiritual and physical illnesses, and their treatments reconfigure what we mean by “healing” in medical discourses. 

Papers are sought for this virtual (online) session of the PAMLA 2021 conference (Nov. 11-14, 2021; https://www.pamla.org/) that explore the way the disciplines of the humanities unlock the human experience behind disease for patients, healthcare providers, and public health officials alike. Close readings of selected cultural texts that explore specific disease events, investigations into cultural responses to broader healthcare issues, or even considerations about the challenges of teaching students during a pandemic, are encouraged.

CFP:  Nightmare Before Christmas (Key Films/Filmmakers in Animation series, Bloomsbury) 

This edited collection will consider Nightmare Before Christmas as a milestone in animation and film history as well as a key cultural object with lasting impact. The book will be inserted in Bloomsbury’s Key Film/Filmmakers in Animation series. 

Podcasting constitutes a new form of digital media which cannot be reduced to the phenomenon of which some would describe as the “Radio Renaissance” on the Internet. Moreover, podcasts have crossed over from a cultural niche to mainstream, as evidenced not only by a vast number of titles available on countless platforms and applications, but also by the increasing number of listeners and transmedia influences of podcasts in the form of TV series and literary adaptations (such as Lore, Welcome to Night Vale, Limetown and others).

With over seventy titles to his name and new ones in the making, Charles de Lint is among the most prolific writers of Canadian speculative fiction and a key representative of urban fantasy/mythic fiction. Given his vast literary output, several awards (including the World Fantasy Award in 2000 and the Aurora Award in 2013 and again in 2015), and a large gathering of devoted readers (if Facebook profiles such as “The Mythic Café, with Charles de Lint & Company” are any indication), it is more than surprising that his fiction has yet to become the subject of a full-length academic study. That is not to say, of course, that the academia is unaware of de Lint’s presence.

As Anne Washburn will be in attendance at the 44th Comparative Drama Conference, there will be a panel dedicated to her plays.

The conference does not require any specific focus, but some possible topics are:

Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play and other post-apocalyptic plays/works

Washburn’s interest in popular culture in her plays (for example, The Simpsons in Mr. Burns, her adaption of The Twilight Zone)

Washburn’s contribution to the growing number of plays about Trump or inspired by Trump (Shipwreck)

Washburn in dialogue with other playwrights

Binary Modernisms addresses the convergence of modernism and digital technologies in their disruption of traditional methods of art creation.

The 2022 Emily Dickinson International Society Conference in Seville,

“Dickinson and Foreignhood”

The Emily Dickinson International Society invites proposals for papers and panels at its international conference “Dickinson and Foreignhood,” scheduled at the College of Philology, University of Seville, Spain, from Tuesday, July 12, to Thursday, July 14, 2022. Because the academic calendar for 2021-2022 at the University of Seville is pending, conference dates will be confirmed in July 2021.

The following is a call for papers for a panel at the 2021 triennial conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, November 4-7 in Baltimore, MD. 

The Department of European Literature at the University of the Republic (Uruguay) announces its 11th International Montevideana Conference, to be held virtually.

It is tempting to think of Boccaccio's most important work in relation to our current times, given that in recent months the Decameron has become a virtual meeting place through rewrites, seminars, and group readings dedicated to the text. The superposition of his pandemic with ours has become, in more than one sense, a paradoxical kind of locus amoenus, adding a new layer to the varied investigations and artistic appropriations that this Italian text has motivated in its 700 years of existence.

The cognitivist turn sparked a renewed interest in narrative analysis that extends beyond the study of literature. It has expanded across media such as film, graphic novels, video games, and music. This conference focuses on the study of narrative and narrativity in music. While some critics are convinced of music’s capacity for story-building, others consider the use of narrative theory derived from literary studies for the analysis of music unsuitable. This conference takes music’s narrative potential as its point of departure but recognizes that musical narrativity is scalar.