The 120th Annual PAMLA Conference

The PAMLA 2023 Conference will be held at the Hilton Portland Downtown in Portland, Oregon between October 26-29, 2023,

The 2023 PAMLA Conference is being held entirely in-person. We won’t be having any virtual or hybrid sessions or papers.

PAMLA, founded as the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast in 1899, and the western affiliate of the Modern Language Association, is dedicated to the advancement and diffusion of knowledge of ancient and modern languages, literatures, and cultures.

Literary, theoretical, and philosophical engagements with “the everyday” have a broad, transhistorical scope—from stoic philosophy to canonical hours, or medieval books of precepts; from Locke and Kant in the eighteenth century to Wittgenstein, Austin, and the ordinary language philosophy of the early twentieth century; from Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to Toril Moi and Stanley Cavell; from considerations of the realist novel of the nineteenth century to the modernist novel of the twentieth (and beyond). 

This year, MMLA’s general call questions what the academy “owe[s] democracy,” namely how academics engage with shared truths. In keeping with the general call, the Religion and Literature permanent section invites proposals that examine how authors interrogate institutionalized systems of belief. 

Those aspiring to be on the panel should feel empowered to offer proposals that interpret the concept of religion rather loosely by potentially including the academy as an institution of belief. Maintaining a broad interpretation of religion to include all intersections of faith, folklore, belief, and literature, expressions of belief may include creeds, mottos, mission statements, the constitution, charters, manifestos, doctrines, etc. 

Title: Bodies, Bodies, Bodies: Theorizing Complex Embodiment

Conference: MLA 2024, in Philidelphia, PA, January 4th to 7th, 2024

MLA ID #: 22876

MLA Confex Link: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2024/webprogrampreliminary/Paper22876.html 

The field of narrative medicine recognizes that stories articulate the language of the body. Rita Charon, the founder of the field of narrative medicine, brought both patient and practitioner to a fuller recognition of stories as a source of medical insight and intervention: stories that may take shape in words but originate through bodily drives. Drawing lessons from psychoanalysis about “attention, drives, and relationships,” she reminded us that the nineteenth-century photographs of hysteria captured images of bodies telling stories not yet spoken.

In Passage : The International Journal of Writing and Mobility, the journal of the Department of English of the University of Boumerdes (Algeria), seeks essays in English or French for its sixth issue, to be released in December 2023. 
 
 All the contributions should either be written in English or discuss questions that relate to the English-speaking world. They should fit within the broad scope of texts and mobility and their interconnectedness in the fields of literature, linguistics, and translation, among others.

Suggested topics:

- Travel literature and intercultural contact.

- Nomadism.

- Exile in literature

-  Literary genres and movements

CALL FOR PAPERS

Reading Tolkien in the 21st Century
(7–8 September, 2023 – University of Bonn, Germany)

In his discussion of the socio-ecological crisis of capitalism, Jason Moore dismisses the theoretical tendency to describe ‘twin’ social and environmental crises, arguing that ‘these are in fact a singular process of transformation that today we call a crisis’ (2011: 136). The 2023 Territorial Bodies: World Culture in Crisis conference proposed the notion of ‘territorial bodies’ as an analytical tool for addressing the singular socio-ecological crisis further.

The Irish Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Forum invites proposals for a guaranteed roundtable at MLA 2024 (4-7 January) in Philadelphia, PA. 

This roundtable considers points of collision, comparison, and friction in the diasporic literary and cultural histories of the Global South and Ireland. How have different legacies of conquest, occupation, and resistance determined understandings of belonging to knowable communities? In turn, how have distinct practices and experiences of diaspora helped to effect specific forms of identity, affiliation, and tendency? And how have literary and cultural works served to articulate these relations into the fraught present? 

RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

66th Annual Conference

Saturday, 23 September 2023

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for our 66th Annual Conference, to be held at the University of San Diego.

CALL FOR PAPERS

How can we harness of the power of Black joy? How have Black thinkers, scholars, and artists turned their attention to forms of Black happiness as a critical and necessary affectual response to the logics of Black death? How can we describe—and make meaningful—the radical potential of Black happiness and joy as antidotes to the overwhelming logics of Black death and destruction? While keeping in view the manifold ways Black life is denigrated, devalued, and destroyed, this panel seeks to explore representations of Black bliss, tenderness, pleasure, jubilation, mirth, and exhilaration.

CFP: edited collection -- Disability and the Vampire

Dr. Brooke Cameron (Queen’s University), Peadar O’Dea (Maynooth University) and Adam Owsinski (Charles Darwin University) invite proposals for chapters that explore the connections between vampires and disability, from history to modern cultural and popular representations.

Project Description:

The English Graduate Student Society's Annual Spring Conference: Recovery

For over a decade, this interdisciplinary conference-proudl hosted by Florida Atlantic University's EGSS- has celebrated creative & scholarly work by graduate students in the South Florida area. We invite grad students to submit a proposal for any work, be it critical or creative, that they might like to present via conference format.

Presentations will be held both in person and on Zoom the weekend of April 20th.

Proposal Cuidelines:

CALL FOR PAPERS

Environmental Racism and Environmental Casteism: African American and Indian Dalit Literature