The Jonathan Bayliss Society (www.jonathanbayliss.org) invites proposals for papers to be presented at the following roundtable at the 2021 American Literature Association annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts, July 7-11, 2021.

Please note: If a selected panelist is unable to travel to Boston because of the Pandemic, we may allow an electronic presentation, such as through Zoom.

Poems Invited for JUNE 2021 Issue of Taj Mahal Review 39th Issue

In the context of the current viral pandemic, we look with fresh intensity at figurations of the invalid and of disease and disability in James’s fictional and non-fictional writing. With an eye to the cultural and political aspects of public health measures aimed at managing the spread of an infectious pathogen, we ask in particular about the relation in James’s work of sickness, subjectivity and society. How do James’s texts relate social experience to bodily ill-health or impairment? Does James position the invalid as a figure indicative of dysfunction in the larger social body, or suggest, in contrast, that illness or disability may be associated with an excess of social contact, a failure of ‘social distancing’?

Synopsis: A number of anniversaries in 2021 — including the tenth of the premiere of David Benioff and W.B. Weiss’ television series, Game of Thrones, Tom Perrotta’s novel, The Leftovers, and Terrence Malick’s film, The Tree of Life, and the twentieth of Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods — is a provocative occasion for a critical reexamination of these and related parables at the intersection of the secular and the supernatural, in their original formulations and as they have developed subsequently.

Call for Papers: Black Popular Culture-Special Topics (Deadline has been extended to February 28!)

PCA 2021 National Conference, June 2-5 (Virtual)

Popular Culture Association (PCA)

Call for Papers

MLA 2022 in Washington DC (hopefully!)

Poe scholars and Poe aficionados are always talking about Poe and always reading and rereading his works. He is ubiquitous—in print, film, popular culture, and all over the internet. His online presence increased even more in the late winter and early spring of 2020 as the world wrestled with the COVID-19 pandemic. For those of us who teach Poe and those of us who write about him, doing so in 2020 and 2021 seems more timely than ever, but it also feels different.

This panel gathers papers that consider relational models of disability and histories of systemic racism in the U.S. to read quotidian practices of care. We situate care across scales, as we ask how care relationships between individuals are embedded in larger practices of identifying and resisting racialized harm in contexts including medical access, environmental racism, housing inequality, and economic justice. How, as disability and race scholars, can we consider individual and everyday acts of care as sites at which to identify and resist structural conditions of ableist, racialized physical and psychological harm and reimagine the dynamics of vulnerability and difference?

Extension: Call for Papers, Elizabeth Bowen Review: Volume 4, 2021

 The editors of the Elizabeth Bowen Review are seeking scholarly and innovative essays for publication in the fourth volume of the journal in September 2021.

For this issue, the editors are particularly interested in essays on Bowen’s short stories. However, we are very keen to see essays on any aspect of Bowen’s writing – this could include work as a reviewer and critic, Bowen’s travel writing (e.g. A Time in Rome) and non-fiction.

Essays should be 6-7,000 words including citations, and use Harvard referencing. Please attach a 150-word abstract and short biography. Completed essays should be submitted by May 31st 2021.

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, cinema, television, and related media have become increasingly central both to individual lives and to the lives of peoples, groups, and nations. Cinema has become a major form of cultural expression and films both reflect and influence the attitudes and behaviour of people, representing their tensions and anxieties, hopes and desires and incarnating social and cultural determinants of the era in which they were made. 

The conference aims to explore Europe from a variety of perspectives. It will consider its political, social and philosophical dimensions as well as the cultural and intellectual life of Europe. Proposals can demonstrate both national and regional expertise, refer to the past or present, or offer a comparative analysis.

The main objective of the event is to bring together international scholars interested in European Studies and willing to examine intersections between their topic of interest and the broader European context. It will provide an integrated approach to the understanding of the processes within Europe.

Topics include but are not limited to:

The conference seeks to explore the past and current status of gender identity around the world, to examine the ways in which society is shaped by gender and to situate gender in relation to the full scope of human affairs. Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

This summer school will cover topics in Film Studies, Media and Communication, Visual Culture, Oral History and Documentary Techniques. The school courses will explore the representations of time, space and ritual, gender roles and gendered gaze, they will also discuss memory, remembering and (auto)biographical practices, especially in conflict narratives.

We are looking forward to applications from students, researchers and professionals with a particular interest related to Film and Media Studies. The course will allow you to deepen theoretical and methodological knowledge and critical thinking in the field.

Vector and Focus invite proposals for articles on the broad theme of class in science fiction and fantasy, encompassing topics such as: representations of class and class struggle in SFF; models for resistance; anarchism in SFF; fantastical estrangements of class; class consciousness; class and material culture; class and climate change; platform capitalism and the gig economy; platform cooperativism; automation and the future of work; trade unionism, industrial organising and action; workplace democracies; speculative classless societies; class and migration; class, family, and Critical Kinship Studies; economic vs.

How do race, racism, and anti-racism operate among US transcendentalists? What alternative vocabularies and theoretical models have their Black contemporaries and later Black thinkers created? We invite proposals that challenge or reform the legacies of transcendentalism. Potential topics (others are welcome):

-     constructions of race

-     systemic racism

-     Black intellectual/aesthetic traditions

-     Black writers/speakers

-     epistemologies

-     gender(s)

-     queer/trans of color critiques

-     disidentification

-     intersectionality

-     conversation as method

-     languages

-     critiques and revisionist readings of "transcendentalism"