Imprisoned in 1642, Richard Lovelace penned the words that became his best-known: “Stone walls do not a prison make,/Nor iron walls a cage:/Minds innocent and quiet take/That for a hermitage” (“To Althea, From Prison”).

Lovelace’s poem points to the duality of the prison as both a physical structure and a mental and spiritual condition. Moreover, the poem submits that the mind can remain free even while the body is confined. For Lovelace, the only true prison is the prison of the mind and soul.

This panel will explore the topics of the prisoner and of the prison as a physical and/or psychological element in novels, stories, poems, films, television, and other genres and media.

Call for Papers

Western Regional Conference on Christianity & Literature 2024

ConVersing/ConServing: Care, Creation, Communion

May 9-11, 2024

Trinity Western University

22500 University Drive

Langley, BC Canada V2Y 1Y1

Our keynote speaker:

According to the US State Department, political imprisonment is what happens elsewhere, “enabled by Orwellian legal systems designed to target peaceful protestors or government critics.” That the US would deny its participation in these processes comes as no surprise. Critics of empire and the carceral state often note that the US does in fact target protestors and imprison opponents, such that the “Orwellian” is everywhere. These critics have also put pressure on the distinction between political prisoners and “common criminals,” arguing that this distinction abjects the members of criminalized populations, whom it relegates to a place outside politics.

The Center for Medieval-Renaissance Studies at the University of Virginia's College at Wise announces the Thirty-Sixth Medieval-Renaissance Conference, September 21-23, 2023

Keynote Address

 Matthew Gabriele

Virginia Tech University

 Oathbreakers: The Long Shadow of Fontenoy (841 CE)

in the European Middle Ages

Our conference aims to encourage studies that explore an emerging paradigm in intermediality studies centred on "affective intermediality", and we hope to initiate a friendly, scholarly debate regarding the relevance and productivity of this approach. The necessity of such an “affective turn” of intermediality studies arises from viewing intermediality as an intricate and highly performative process of communication between humans within a particular context of material reality and historical time, not just as a “transfer”, a “combination” or “reference” of media characteristics or representations, i.e.

This panel invites papers that explore literary representations of populations—immigrants, migrant workers, the racially or sexually marginalized, disabled persons, etc.—that are rendered ‘surplus’ by American society. This might be through economic, political, or interpersonal forces. This panel is especially interested in the ways these populations resist this dehumanization and forge their own communities. The label ‘surplus’ pushes these populations to the margins of society, deeply isolating them. Isolation is one of the most crippling afflictions that an individual can encounter, leaving them with no support system when forces like prejudices, poverty, or oppression affect them so deeply.

This roundtable invites critics and writers to rethink cities (or neighborhoods/areas within cities) that are essential to understanding “American writing,” yet still seem to remain outside or “extraneous” to discussions of “American literature.”  What historical cities, lost neighborhoods, or even ruins/necropoli are critical to enduring issues explored within American writing?  What stories seem lost within locales trimmed of their histories?  How does re-centered dialogue around these locations remap American literary production?  What trajectories or points of transit are central to discussions of “canonical texts” in the present moment?  How do these questions reframe concepts of diaspora or a “literature of the Americas?” 

CFP: paper proposals for session at NeMLA (March 7-10, 2024, Boston, MA)

Please consider submitting an abstract for the 2024 NeMLA Convention:

This panel aims to examine how elective, therapeutic, spontaneous abortions, and stillbirths are represented in work of literature and cinema from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective at the intersection of gender studies and the medical humanities. We welcome papers that engage with novels, graphic novels, memoirs, cross-genre texts, poems, films, and documentaries, that address experiences of pregnancy loss in contemporary societies, cultures, and languages, by using different methodologies. 

Call for Papers: Consent and Cultural Competency (Winter 2023)
Extension of previous deadline.

Seeking submissions in the form of articles and/or notes from the field. Both formats are reviewed through double-blind peer review. Find more details and guidelines here: https://journals.calstate.edu/jcbp/about/submissions

Undue Burdens: Reproductive Rights and Bodily Autonomy in the Long Eighteenth Century 

Eds. Fiona Brideoake, Ula Lukszo Klein, and Nicole Garret  

Call for Papers

Reading for Life in Uncertain Times: Literature and Wellbeing.

Online interdisciplinary Symposium: 13-14 September 2023

Hosted by La Trobe University

"There is always a wild card. And what I had were books. What I had, most of all, was the language that books allowed. A way to talk about complexity. A way to ‘keep the heart awake to love and beauty’ (Coleridge)"

Jeanette Winterson

CFP: Saying Yes to Nope: Cinema, Spectacle, and Race in Jordan Peele’s Nope

Editors: Russell Meeuf, Nancy McGuire Roche, and Eric Gary Anderson

Jordan Peele’s third feature film, Nope, has cemented Peele’s place in contemporary cinema as a visionary auteur concerned with cinema, race, genre, and media spectacle. Building on his work as a writer-director on Get Out and Us, and expanding his oeuvre as a film and television producer across genres, Nope is Peele’s most reflexive work to date, exploring our cultural obsessions with spectacle and media culture’s impact on people of color.     

This issue of Critical Times probes the question of solidarity—its subjects, horizons, difficulties, and limits. In some social-theoretical accounts, solidarity is a force that coheres subjects, holds them together in one community, and coordinates their aspirations, sympathies, or interests in perfect unity. Solidarity, in other words, transcends differences to generate unity; indeed, it converts difference into sameness. And when such differences persist or reappear in new forms, solidarity is said to be in danger or to have failed. Yet this is neither the only archive nor the only horizon of solidarity.