Speculative fiction covers a broad range of narrative styles and genres.  The cohesive element that pulls works together under the category is that there is some “unrealistic” element, whether it’s magical, supernatural, or a futuristic/technological development: works that fall into the category stray from conventional realism in some way.   For this reason, speculative fiction can be quite broad, including everything from fantasy and magical realism to horror and science fiction—from China Miéville to Margaret Atwood to Philip K. Dick. This panel aims to explore those unrealistic elements and all their varied implications about society, politics, economics, and more. 

1. The International Nabokov Society invites paper proposals for a guaranteed session at MLA 2022 (Washington, D.C., 6-9 January 2022).  We invite papers on Nabokov’s languages, the transnational and  multi-lingual Nabokov, his invented languages, translation (between languages, cultures and different genres and media), Nabokov’s theory of language, Nabokov’s style,  etc.  We particularly welcome comparative, transnational, and intermedial perspectives.  Please send 250-word abstracts and brief CVs to siggy.frank@nottingham.ac.uk and zokuzmanovich@davidson.edu by 15  March 2021.

MLA 2022 Non-Guaranteed Session CFP: Comics on the Border

(DEADLINE: 3/15/2021)

Call for Papers for a proposed non-guaranteed roundtable sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum to be held (if accepted) at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Jan. 6-9, 2022, in Washington D.C.

Comics are defined by borders in formal representation and structure, in the boundaries between word and image and generic categories, in the networks and communities of mainstream and alternative production and circulation.

This two-day interdisciplinary symposium invites scholars to examine early modern women’s agency from a transnational perspective. Conversations about women’s agency continue to ripple across the world, from new, passionate campaigns in Mexico and Poland that have fought to address feminicide and sexual violence, to the Women’s Marches, which have annually inspired global response. Now, we turn with fresh urgency to early modern women’s participation in intellectual and literary cultures that bridged regional, national, and transnational divides.

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

Children appear in James’s fiction in many different kinds of roles, from the annoying little brother in Daisy Miller to the impressionable girl of What Maisie Knew. He also wrote extensively about his own childhood and those of his siblings. None of these writings are, however, for child readers, unlike the work of Lewis Carroll or Robert Louis Stevenson or Mark Twain or Louisa May Alcott. What opportunities does James find in his representations of children? How does the development of his late style affect these possibilities? These topics are suggestions, but other approaches to the subject are invited.

In crises, many of us turn to literature and other forms of popular culture not only for comfort, but for insight, guidance. So it is in the "Covid era," that we have turned to "pandemic literature" and related forms for popular Culture, including Stephen King’s The Stand (1978, 1990) and its adaptations to date (1994, on television, and 2008 and 2012, in comics). Already provocative, the phenomenon is all the more so for Josh Boone's recent television adaptation, appearing amidst the ongoing pandemic, from December 17, 2020 through February 11, 2021 (http://www.imdb.com/video/vi2525675801). More so still, King, in writing the finale’s screenplay, has enriched the original’s conclusion.

Call for Papers: Cultural Adaptations

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

Popular Culture Association (PCA)

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. 

Study in London this summer!

Spend an amazing week in London and learn about gender across different disciplines – literature and culture, philosophy and sociology, media and communication, history and political science, religious studies and education.

Topics to be covered include: human rights and (in)equality, gender and migration, gender and violence, gender and creativity, gender and beauty, ecofeminism, anti-feminism and many more. Our team of international scholars will enhance your knowledge and facilitate dialogue and discussions.

This conference will provide a deeper look into the dynamic and complex relation between construction, codes, language, expression, on one side and the crisis of representations, traumas, discontinuities and tensions in discourses, on the other. This will be conducted according to three research areas:

1. The anachronism

2. Narratives and discourse

3. The temporality of trauma and subjectivity