Something has changed about the way we watch reality TV. For example, Selling Sunset, a show about selling luxury homes in the Hollywood Hills area, is the new platonic ideal of reality TV. It presents the glamorous, unattainable Hollywood lifestyle but is grounded by the viewers’ social media engagement with the subjects online. These viewing practices facilitate a novel method of watching reality TV. Engagement is now self-reflexive: drama on many of the shows has its roots in Instagram, TikTok, or Reddit feuds about the show, rather than actual conflicts that unfold on-camera. Other series, such as Vanderpump Rules, Indian Matchmaking, and Too Hot to Handle similarly thrive in this social media economy.

From the Yucatán Peninsula to the Florida Keys, the many cultures of the greater Gulf have inscribed the region with their distinctive architectures, re-formed landscapes, and imagined spaces. Where once the Karankawas constructed the ba’ak, the petroleum complex sprawls with its refineries, tank farms, and pipelines.

Session Title: Beowulf the Monster 

Session#5331

Importance:

Although Beowulf has long held place as a praise poem, a rising tide of critique has noted various elements that frame the central protagonist and other heroic figures in the poem as monstrous in key respects (Greenfield, 1982; Griffith 1995; Orchard 1995; Köberl 2002; Sharma 2005; Gwara 2009). Despite these critiques, however, the hero’s virtuous standing remains intact—particularly, in his reputation for exceptional loyalty in a poem replete with inter-tribal feuds and intra-tribal treachery.

Description for Call for Papers:

Seeking Contributors for MLA volume, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Colson Whitehead

Edited by Stephanie Li

CRES Justice Conference 2024: Movements and Migrations

#cresjustice2024

March 7 and 8, 2024

Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies

Texas Christian University

Fort Worth, TX

Abstract Deadline: Monday, October 16, 2023

Conference Keynote Speaker: Dr. Karma Chávez, The University of Texas at Austin

CALL FOR PAPERS

Sacred Cultures in Politics, a collection of scholarly articles, seeks to reveal sacred and/or religious rhetoric serving as persuasive tools in the vast arena of political activism. In his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben challenges religious institutions to use their persuasive powers not for priestly privilege but “to make a new possible” for humanity. In a similar spirit, this collection seeks to make transparent both the rhetorical systems and their use in local, national, regional, or global political arenas.

Call for Papers, MELUS Themed Issue:

“Black Speculations / Black Futures”

Guested Edited by Justin L. Mann and Samantha Pinto

Deadline for Abstracts: November 17, 2023 

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the blockbuster cinematic world of

Wakanda, Black futures proliferate—hypervisible in sci-fi casting, in reading lists for liberal

audiences, in political discourses of anti-racism and their backlash. But imagining Black futures

is not, in fact, a new (pre)occupation in Black literature and expressive culture. World-building,

Call for Papers: International Committee Focus Panel

2024 Children’s Literature Association Conference

May 30-June 1, 2024

Madison, Wisconsin, USA

“Memory”

Author-focused literary studies have long ruled the roost, but some of the most important books have not had clear authors. Rather than a single author, these books have multiple authors, or false authors, or no author, or we simply do not know who conceived of and wrote

Re-Creating Camelot? Community-Building in Arthurian Studies (A Roundtable) (virtual)

Sponsored by Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain and International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)

Organizers: Michael A. Torregrossa and Joseph M. Sullivan

Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 15 September 2023

59th International Congress on Medieval Studies

Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan)

Hybrid event: Thursday, 9 May, through Saturday, 11 May, 2024

In a 2015 multimedia manifesto titled “Towards Arabfuturism/s” the Jordanian artist Sulaïman Majali writes that “Arabfuturism/s, like most creative provocations, is born of counter-culture” in which “notions of belonging are constantly challenged by the strangers, the marginalised, the outsiders: workers, rebels, immigrants, artists who see from the margins– looking in – that there is no homogenous culture or identity.” For Majali, like many contemporary artists interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst ecological, territorial, existential, and ideological states of crisis, -futurism “signifies a defiant cultural break, a projection forward into what is, beyond ongoing eurocentric, hegemonic narrativ

Two-Day

International Seminar

on

Literature as Discourse

5th & 6th October 2023

Organized by

Research and Cultural Forum (RCF)

Department of English

Pondicherry University

Puducherry-605014

Host Department:

Queer Children’s Film and Television

Online One-Day Symposium, 17th November 2023 

Individual papers are welcomed for ‘Queer Children’s Film and Television,’ an online, one-day symposium to be held on 17th November 2023. The symposium explores depictions of queerness in children’s film and television, and the queerness of children’s films and TV. This symposium precedes an opportunity to contribute to a proposed edited collection, intended as a part of Edinburgh University Press’ new ‘Children’s Film and Television’ book series.