This proposed volume of interdisciplinary essays reexamines the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) as a labor project. We are working with a publisher to feature this book, Working through the Federal Writers’ Project: Labor, Place, Archive, and Representation, as part of a potential series on the FWP,  on the burgeoning field of FWP studies, and on how FWP studies fits in the larger framework of labor studies. Labor, in this sense, is not a narrow category. It encompasses trade unions, working conditions, labor power, political economy, and the everyday reality of working lives.

AMODERN 12: Alternative Print Technologies and Revolution

Edited by Thomas S. Mullaney and Andrew Amstutz
300-word proposals due: 31 March 2023
Drafts of 4000-8000 words due: 1 June 2023

This MLA panel invites critical and ethical interrogations that underpin the urgency to look beyond the single-issue strategies of reading and creating South Asia in critical discourse. Incidentally, the scholarly trajectory of issues on South Asia has flattened the diversity of the geopolitically, culturally rich discursive space and its experiences to increasingly refer to India-centric discussions.

Phenomenology is a tradition of thinking that acknowledges the already-givenness of our bodies, our relationships to others, and the ecosystems in which we live. Since the founding of the field in the early twentieth century, phenomenologists have taken an interest in the ways that humans engage the world that precedes us, but it was only in the last twenty years that scholars recognized the potential phenomenology could have for environmental ethics and the ongoing multi-disciplinary rethinking of our human relationship to the more-than-human world.

The year between December 29th 2022 and December 29th 2023 would have been the hundredth of William Gaddis’ life. Between 1955, when he published The Recognitions, and 1998, when he died shortly after completing Agapē Agape, Gaddis was notorious for a disproportion between reputation and readership. Being reflexively labelled “difficult,” with his own novels’ wry figurations of characters writing “for a very small audience,” and with a tendency to be categorized (though not always actually read) alongside the increasingly unfashionable “high postmodernists”… all this might have made it hard to envisage his work surviving into the 2000s.

Please find below a call for contributions for issue 19.1 of Textes et Contextes, an online jounal published by the University of  Burgundy). The papers we are calling for will be published along with the proceedings of the two-day symposium, entitled “Music and Memory in Anglophone Literature” that was held in Dijon on September 19-20, 2019.

The majority of research on 19th-century literary representations of sexual violence variously restricts the field by 1) explicitly or implicitly treating rape as an exceptional crime; 2) limiting analyses to what Erin Spampinato has termed “adjudicative reading,” or legalistic approaches that evaluate rape stories as if they were real-life court cases; and 3) attending only to narratives about cisgender men’s violations of white cisgender women, especially within the middle-class home, to the exclusion of nonheterosexual, queer, and colonial contexts.

This panel explores Black geographies (both real and imagined) of joy/sorrow in African American literature, examining how geographic thought, speculation, and practice produce joys/sorrows for Black subjects and communities. Send a 200-word abstract and CV.

Dorottya Mozes, University of Debrecen

Conrad's works feature linguistic sophistication, narrative complexity, psychological nuance, subtle irony, political contestation, and historical challenge. While some might seek to avoid difficulty, this panel instead embraces difficulty and considers how precisely the most challenging aspects of Conrad's art can empower students and cultivate subtlety, humanistic and historical breadth, and even humility. This panel invites papers that consider how the multivalent difficulty of Conrad’s works — syntactic, psychological, political, or aesthetic — offers pedagogical opportunity.  Comparative approaches are welcome.

Call for Papers for Women in French

2023 Midwest Modern Language Association Convention

Cincinnati, Ohio

November 2-5, 2023

I am pleased to announce the Call for Papers for WIF at the 2023 MMLA Convention (to be held in person November 2-5 in Cincinnati, OH). We welcome proposals that relate the study of French and Francophone women authors, the study of women’s place in French and Francophone cultures or literatures, and feminist literary criticism to this year’s theme: “Going Public: What the MMLA Owes Democracy.”

Call for Submissions

The acceleration of diverse and converging crises—climate disaster and apartheid, environmental racism and resurgent ecofascism, ecocide and land grabbing—reinforce that environmental violence has become an unmistakable feature of contemporary life. Edge Effects seeks submissions that ask how violence is enacted through, for, and on environmental spaces, including land, water, and air. 

The Twenty Seventh Annual Conference of the
Arab-US Association for Communication Educators (AUSACE)

Kuwait University, Kuwait

28-30 October 2023

THEME: Changing Media Landscapes: Convergence and Fragmentation

Media platforms have developed at an unprecedented rate recently, disrupting traditional
models for publishing, broadcasting, and advertising and creating a need for identifying new
models. As media become more fragmented and at the same time converge, implications can be
seen across several different areas, such as the way people access media, how media are
marketed, and how the media industry is changing.

Recent work like George Edmondson’s The Neighboring Text or Seeta Chaganti’s Strange Footing models close engagement with medieval manuscripts that offers new modes of experiencing literature beyond the historically positivist, empirically material, or hermeneutically suspicious, either by recognizing the limitations of theoretical lenses or by approaching language beyond information. This session asks how looking at the character of the medieval text on the manuscript page–its calligraphy, titles, rubrics, initials, performance cues, polysemy–might allow us to consider anew readers’ encounters, medieval and modern, with that text.

Several recent, celebrated studies of late medieval English literature present their anchoring motivations as including one or more twenty-first century activist concerns – for example, scholarship that considers Chaucer and rape culture, examines the medieval roots or affinities of contemporary white supremacy, thinks ecocritically about the medieval beyond-human, juxtaposes medieval political events with modern ones, etc. Methodologically, such studies have involved explicit interleaving of analysis of late medieval English literary texts with considerations of texts, events, or discourses of the present.