UC Irvine Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference 2025 

Conference Date: April 3 & 4, 2025

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Tracy McNulty (Cornell)

The 21st century has been marked as an emerging epoch of new discourses with a dynamic change of intellectual, methodological, epistemological and critical avenues of research to address the swiftly changing nuances of social, political, economic, personal and professional lives of human beings all over the world. Researchers have embraced innovative approaches, methodologies and pedagogies to navigate the new complex frontiers of 21st Century. As the world grapples with multifaceted challenges such as climate change, economic inequality, and global health crises, the need for innovative approaches to economic development has become more urgent than ever.

4th EDITION THEME: Do Films Lie?

"Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth."
Michael Haneke

Cinema exists within the narrative frame that the director or writer chooses. How closely that reflects reality is entirely arbitrary. Yet it is undeniable that like all art, film plays a fundamental role in shaping the way we think about politics, culture, identity, and social norms.

Ege University 20th Cultural Studies Symposium

AI & Cultural Production

6-8 May 2026

To think in terms of risk is to imagine the future as a set of foreseeable possibilities and to ameliorate the potentially hazardous ones through action in the present. Distinct from danger, which is seen as inchoate and incalculable, risk carries with it the notion of statistical, probabilistic, or otherwise enumerated legibility, and the costs and benefits of prospective courses of action are given the narrative authority of mathematical language. But even as risk posits itself as a rational approach to considerations of the future, it ignores the mythology of its own construction: risk is, as its critics note, always a process of storytelling.

For close to nine hundred years, Gawain has been a favorite hero in Arthurian myth, especially when it comes to his appearance in the late fourteenth-century chivalric romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While scholarship on the poem continues to expand in many fascinating ways, David Lowery’s 2021 adaptation, The Green Knight, has changed the way scholars can approach and teach the medieval poem. The editors of this book proposal seek essays that explore some of the compelling changes Lowery makes to the base text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and what we can learn about the importance—or dangers—of retelling popular stories in new and inventive ways.

Recently I, Tawnya Azar (co-editor), posted a request for information on the Writing Studies listserv to solicit information and ideas about hosting a celebration of student writing event in my composition program. After a long search for published research or essays on student writing events, I was finding very little and hoped I would at least get a few additional recommendations for published works on the subject. Instead many faculty and program heads contacted me with generous, detailed descriptions of student writing events they previously ran or currently run, and I was struck by the diversity and potential impact of these events on campus communities.

Despite its status as one of cinema’s most enduring and popular genres, complete with a rich history of narrative tropes, aesthetic conventions and character types, the sports film is more frequently analysed as a vehicle for the on-screen representation of sport than a distinct film genre. The representation of sport may be an identifying feature of the sports film, but in the way that horses are an identifying feature of westerns: a key part, to be sure, but film criticism would be much poorer if it elided the complexity of John Wayne’s performance in The Searchers to focus on the horse he rode. We seek abstracts for an edited collection reflecting the depth and breadth of the sports film as genre.

The crafts of India are varied and illustrate the economy, history, culture, religious beliefs, politics, material culture, societal formations and creative faculties of a civilization. The craftsmanship of many states of India reflects diverse cultural influences and has a significant narrative relating to its origins. For ages, crafts have served as an archive of culture and heritage in various communities in India. Every state of India narrates its tales of handicrafts. The wonderful artistry of handcrafted artifacts, the traditions woven in time, get eroded by automation and accuracy, which draw us towards the ‘sophistication’ of repetitive mass production in a capitalist society.

Deadline Extended to Friday, January 17, 2025

The George Saunders Society invites prospective participants for one or two panels at the 2025 American Literature Association conference in Boston, MA, to be held May 21 to 25, 2025. We are interested in presentations on any aspect of George Saunders’s life and work; in this, our fifth year of activity at ALA (returning after an absence in 2024!), we continue to be interested in papers that challenge, complicate, or go beyond the most common (particularly religious, ethical, or new sincerest) readings of the author’s work in the critical literature to this point. The topic is therefore open, but possible approaches might include:

“It is a strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. ... We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.”

— Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

The University of Maryland’s Graduate English Organization (GEO) invites proposals relating to the theme of “Forward Moving / Moving Forward” for our 18th annual graduate student conference, to be held in person on Friday, March 7, 2025.

Housekeepers: The Latina Maid in Contemporary American Film and Literature, Myra Mendible, Editor

EXTENDED DEADLINE (JANUARY 31)

2-4 July 2025
Facultat de Filologia, Traducció i Comunicació.
Av. de Blasco Ibáñez, 32, València
Universitat de València (Spain)

Concept Note