Howells Society CFPs for ALA 2025 (Boston)

The W.D. Howells Society will host two panels at the American Literature Association’s 36th annual conference, which will meet at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, May 21-24, 2025 (Wednesday through Saturday of Memorial Day weekend). 

PANEL 1: HOWELLS & OTHERS

To mark the conclusion of a biennial research carried out by four Italian Universities (Siena, Turin, Florence, and Naples “L’Orientale”), the scientific committee of the PRIN 2022 Project Monsters, Sorcerers, and Witches of Northwestern Europe: The Medieval and Early Modern Construction of Otherness in Literature for Popular Audiences invites abstract submissions for a three-day international conference, to be hosted at the University of Siena on 9-11 July 2025.

This year the Latina/o/x Literature & Culture Society welcomes submissions focusing on diverse topics including literary genre, single authors, children’s literature, speculative fiction, comparative analyses, as well as cultural studies approaches. The society also encourages a variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary prisms, and a variety of panel types, including traditional paper sessions, roundtable discussions, and sessions dedicated to the teaching of Latina/o/x literature and culture.

Conference online: 13-14 February 2025

CFP:

In the context of wider postcolonial and decolonial shifts that have occurred in both critical and popular thought over the past decades, we have seen growing interests in recovering and recentering histories of Islamic civilizations and their shaping influence on knowledge, systems,and technologies that we now associate with the modern world. Whether recognized as the powerful authorities that transformed trade, belief, politics, science, and art in the premodernworld, or as the ‘other’ necessary for Western colonial self-fashioning, as per Edward Said’s formative theorization of them in Orientalism, there is no denying that Muslims and Islamicate societies hold a fundamental place in our (global) past.

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.

Call for Proposals: Thinking Politics Book Series (Edinburgh University Press)

Artificial intelligence, technological oligarchy, the environment in distress, a growing authoritarianism and postcolonial imperialism — just some of the flashpoints of the current millennium.

And yet, from the margins, fresh voices emerge, innovative social movements and protest coalitions arise and challenge technocracy and populism.

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Who are the thinkers who can seed the changes that matter most to us today?

How can political theory take us forward, in positive ways?

We invite submissions to our panel at 4S 2025 in Seattle, Washington (September 3 – 7, 2025). Please see details below:

Blackness as Onto-Epistemological Departure and Arrival*

Special Issue of Mississippi Quarterly,

“Emerging Scholars, Emerging Scholarship”

“FREEDOM”

 14 March 2025

Keynote Panelists TBA

Conference Location:The University of the District of Columbia

Law School Building, 4340 Connecticut Avenue,

Washington, DC 20008

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.