Living in the End Times: Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Pandemics in Fiction, Film and Culture 

An Interdisciplinary International Conference (Virtual), Cappadocia University, Turkey

January 14 – 15, 2021

Venue: Cappadocia University, Mustafapaşa Campus, 50420 Ürgüp/Nevşehir/Turkey (Virtual-Microsoft Teams)

Keynote speaker: TBA

Description:

Growing up is a perennial feature of human societies. While anxieties surrounding childhood are universal, the manifestations of these concerns vary between cultures. This series of sessions proposes to shed light upon the nexus of ambiguity surrounding the medieval child, as depicted in contemporaneous literature. We invite abstracts for papers that will explore the representation of childhood in texts of any language, genre, and period within the Middle Ages. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Historical notions of education, child-rearing, and ʻgood

behaviourʼ.

• Non-human and/or monstrous children.

• Infantilised adults and inescapable childhood.

(Re)Connect. (Re-)Establish a bond.

To connect is an integral part of the human experience. We are social, connected, beings. The unparalleled events of 2020 have made this even more evident --- they have forced us to disconnect from life as we knew it and to (re)connect to history, nature, people, ourselves, and forgotten practices. This has weakened and strengthened our established bonds, while creating new ones. Ultimately, it revealed how dependent we are on our connections.

Monmouth University is proud to announce the publication of a new scholarly journal. Entitled AMP: American Music Perspectives, the journal is sponsored by Monmouth University and published by Penn State University Press.

AMP welcomes manuscripts from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives, while also considering traditional, biographical, historical, and archival studies of American music and its artists, composers, genres, and practitioners.  AMP also welcomes interpretive analyses of American music, as well as manuscripts that investigate its sociocultural production, its political manifestations, and the history of the business practices and technological innovations associated with its development.

In the recent years, foreign language teaching has advocated for an increasingly intermedial and interdisciplinary approach, one that enables instructors to expand course materials and integrate a wide array of popular and current cultural products. Advanced courses in literature and culture can develop curricula that more liberally incorporate popular culture into teaching. Yet intermediate courses must combine cultural components with the introduction or the review of grammar structures. This session seeks contributions that address the following: What are the challenges of transitioning from grammar-based to culture-based instruction in intermediate language classes?

Call for Papers for ‘ICMA Student Committee’ Session Proposal

International Medieval Congress (IMC 2021) 5-8 July 2021, University of Leeds

Seeing Climate through Medieval Art and Architecture

The Institute of Gender Studies at the University of Chester, UK, is delighted to announce the fifth biennial TALKING BODIES conference, 28th – 31st July 2021.

https://www1.chester.ac.uk/institute-gender-studies/talking-bodies-2021-conference/aboutFurther information:

Call for Proposals

Masculinities, Sexualities and Esotericism

Special issue in Correspondences

 Guest editors: Tanya Cheadle (University of Glasgow) and Christine Ferguson (University of Stirling)

Historical Fictions Research Network 2021

Online conference (Zoom)

18th-21st February 2021

Theme:  Remembering Catastrophe

Care to join us in an edited volume? When Beacon Press published Rashid Khalildi's Iron Cage, an early review described it as "at heart a historical essay" (New York Times, 7 October 2006), suggesting that it was, "more ... analysis than an exercise in original research." 

Apart from the recent exhibition and attending catalogue for the 2018 Cooper-Hewitt exhibition, Senses: Design Beyond Vision, which focused on countless objects, and Diana Fuss’ compelling The Sense of an Interior(2004) which explores the specific rooms of four giant literary figures from the nineteenth century, a sustained investigation of the complex relationships between the senses and interior design remains elusive. Yet, despite this absence countless are the examples and vantage points from which to explore a constellation of interior design practices, theories and uses that have taken the five senses (sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing) into consideration.

The MLA Convention (virtual, Jan 7-10, 2021) has opened up last-minute slots for proposed sessions discussing the events of summer 2020. The session organizer invites contributions for 15-minute papers that engage one or more intersections of Black studies, sexuality studies, Black feminist criticism, visual cultural studies, and surveillance studies. Full session description here:

The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, currently under contract with Routledge, presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives. In response to the oversaturation of sociological, governmental, and journalistic narratives about refugees, this anthology features academic essays that examine the narratives refugees tell to, for, and about themselves. Engaging a rich variety of genres—fiction, autobiography, prose, poetry, graphic novels, film, photography, performance, social media—the chapters will analyze how conditions of forced displacement and encounters with different asylum regimes shape, but do not circumscribe, the form and content of refugee cultural productions.

In his Defence of Poetry, composed in 1821, Percy Shelley asserts the central importance of the poet—a  general term he uses to include creative artists of all types—to the continuing development of civilization, even in the midst of the Industrial Revolution and the associated celebration of the sciences and technology. In praising the poet as the “unacknowledged legislator of the world,” Shelley sounded a call that still resonates two hundred years later, as the importance of the humanities relative to STEM programs continually becomes debated.  Of course, Shelley’s views on poetry were by no means representative of the period.