Diverse African literary works portray the experiences of African characters in the United States and other Western nations. Such works include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers, and NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names. What do such portrayals tell us about imagined ideas of Western opportunity and promise? What do these types of narratives reveal about shared and divergent outlooks and lifestyles in African and Western communities? What different kinds of political and gender-based experiences are dramatized in these works, and what are the similarities and differences between the views of such experiences by African and Western characters?

Critical Plant Studies, a book series published by Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, calls us to re-examine in fundamental ways our understanding of and engagement with plants, drawing on diverse disciplinary perspectives. A sampling of topics appropriate for this series includes but is not limited to:
• Representations of plants in literature, art, film, and popular culture
• Relationships between humans and plants
• Boundaries and distinctions between plants and animals
• Plants and the environmental crisis
• Phytosemiotics and plant communication
• Plant sensation and consciousness
• Vegetal agency

The (Non)Human and the Monarch in Literatue and Cinema: Western and Global Perspective

This NeMLA 2023 session will explore literary critical and environmental humanities methods for rethinking water justice and urban climate adaptation. We are interested in formal and informal relationships to water justice; representations of riverine and coastal cities; and readings of texts that help us consider governmental, private, and community-based strategies of water management. Topics might include representations of drought, flooding, toxicity and cleanup, water access, and water infrastructures.

CALL FOR PAPERS – DEADLINE SEPTEMBER 30th, 2022

54th Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Annual Convention

at the Niagara Falls Convention Center, Niagara Falls, New York

Special Discussion Panel:

The Many Fortunes of the Courtier:

The Resilience of Castiglione’s Cortegiano

March 23-26, 2023

Call for Papers

Fantasy Goes to Hell: Depictions of Hell in

Modern Fantasy Texts

A Mythcon Online Winter Seminar (28 January 2023)

and Special Issue of Mythlore (Fall/Winter 2023)

Chairs/Editors: Janet Brennan Croft and Erin Giannini

Deadlines:

Proposals for the seminar: November 15, 2022

Submissions for the special issue: May 15, 2023

The environment is still being shaped by anthropocentric acts, facing continuous destruction, and reverberating catastrophic effects on numerous species, including humans both as individuals and as communities. This panel wants to contribute to the ongoing debate about the necessity to improve the human relationship with the environment, with nature, and the need for a significant, long overdue change of the current course of action. The ongoing unscrupulous devastation can lead to extreme outcomes such as extinction, announcing the termination of numerous representations of life in various forms. Yet, a strong resistance to this threat can be encountered in various contexts and is defined in disparate ways through diversified means of communication.

Global Conference on Women and Gender

To be held in person March 16-18, 2023

This interdisciplinary conference on Women and Gender brings together participants from all academic fields to engage in wide-ranging conversations about education as a catalyst for freedom and transformation. Contributors are encouraged to consider education in the diversity of its forms, and how “traditional” and/or “alternative” models, both inside and outside of the classroom, intersect with the politics of gender. What are the social, economic, and intellectual consequences of denying women and marginalized communities access to education? Alternatively, how may education serve as an act of resistance to systems of oppression throughout the world?

Notes from the Field, a publication of the TPS Collective, is now accepting submissions about teaching with primary sources for three series of peer-reviewed blog posts: “Public-Facing Scholarship and Outreach,” “Internships and Long-Term Student Project Management,” and “Accessibility and Access in the Primary Source Classroom.”  These series are intended to highlight a broad range of voices from all sectors of the TPS community.

Series One: Public-Facing Scholarship and Outreach

CFP, South Asian Studies (for the guaranteed South Asian Literary Association session) at CEA 2023

March 30-April 1, 2023 | San Antonio, Texas

Sheraton Gunter Hotel, San Antonio | 205 East Houston Street, San Antonio, TX 78205

(210) 227-3241, https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/satgs-sheraton-gunter-hotel-san-an...

In a germinal essay of literary study, W.J.T. Mitchell observes that the human, “for many philosophers both ancient and modern, is the “representational animal,” homo symbolicum, the creature whose distinctive character is the creation and manipulation of signs—things that “stand for” or “take the place of” something else.” And in the twenty-first century, representation—in its aesthetic, cultural, semiotic, political, and myriad other contemporary dimensions—is strategically deployed for its presumptive ability to carry the burden of material disparities produced along intersecting lines of difference.

CFP: Leeds International Medieval Congress, 3 – 6 July, 2023, “Networks and Entanglements”  

International Association for Robin Hood Studies Sponsored Session(s): “Outlaw Networks” 

Although they sometimes work alone, outlaws in history and literature always belong to a series of networks. They exist alongside, within or outside communities, and have groups of supporters, opponents and comrades.  Outlaw stories depend for their dissemination on networks and groups, and the stories themselves exist within groups of related narratives.  This session examines some of these networks, and the individuals and groups who inhabit them. Possible topics for this session may include the following: 

New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (Routledge) seeks high quality articles, as well as creative work.

Articles submitted might focus on:

• Creative Writing in universities and colleges
• pedagogy, practice or research topics
• the processes of creative writers, their drafts and completed works
• the history of particular writing forms
• analysis of particular creative works

“That’s a Take”: The International Television Commercial as Short Film is a two-day, virtual conference that engages interdisciplinary scholarship from any critical/methodological perspective examining the international television commercial production as a short film narrative. As examined in Consuming Images: Film Art and the American Television Commercial (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) which established the complex vitality of the television commercial both as a short film and as an art form, the television commercial has an aesthetic and historical dynamic linking it directly to cinematic and media cultures.