What does it mean to write and think about nature? Do language, thought, and mimesis ultimately have the capacity to impact (and possibly cultivate) our natural environments, and do these environments in turn have the capacity to impact (and possibly cultivate) our words and ideas? Taking such questions as a starting point, this panel aims to explore how the relationship between the human community and the environment has occupied a central space within literature and thought across various epochs and epistemological arenas. 

Dante Decolonizer: Poet of Justice

Epistemic Plurality and the Ethical Imagination

…ché, per quanti si dice più li ‘nostro’… (Purgatorio, 15.55)

 This NeMLA sponsored seminar is designed to engage Dante’s interrogation of justice as an epistemically rooted, ethical imperative. This year’s speaker’s panel and subsequent roundtable seek to explore Dante’s attention to the centrality of epistemic plurality in the ethical imagination with respect to justice, as exemplified in key passages like: Inferno 3–5, 8, 26, 32–33; Purgatorio 10–11, 13, 15–18, 30–31; and Paradiso 3, 10–12, 17–21. 

Who Was that Masked Woman? Representations of Women Vigilantes and Outlaws in Popular Media from Reconstruction to the Great Depression

We are looking for two chapters to complete a manuscript currently in development with a publisher.  We invite chapter proposals for a collection of critical essays that examine how women vigilantes, anti-heroines, and outlaws were represented in movie serials, radio dramas, films, comics, and pulp fiction in America at the turn of the century.  

“The Art of Losing”: Loss in Literature and Film

Panel Session, NeMLA’s 54th Annual Convention in Niagara Falls, March 23-26

In her iconic poem “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop writes of “the art of losing.” The poem’s speaker first recounts the loss of small things such as “lost door keys” and “an hour badly spent”; then, the losses grow in import: “my mother’s watch,” “three loved houses,” “two cities,” “two rivers, a continent,” and finally, “even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love).”

Fandom flourishes thanks greatly in part to the contributions made by members of marginalized communities. From fanfictions based on queer readings of the original material, to fan art depicting BIPOC character headcanons, fandom has given people the opportunity to engage with media in ways that are oftentimes more inclusive than the original text itself. 

Conference: 28-29 July 2022 (online - via Zoom)

CFP: 

​In our postmodern world there are a lot of questions that should be re-considered and re-defined. What does it mean to fight against colonialism and racism in the world of migration crisis and xenophobic attitudes towards minorities? What does it mean to be a postcommunist country in the face of the common nostalgia for order and rules? How is it possible to have a national identity being aware of the relative character of every national feature?

This roundtable engages what Dylan Rodríguez coins the “Carceral Dilemma of Asian American Studies,” wherein the discipline and the parallel social formation of the “model minority” figure have expanded anti-Black state violence under the guise of a multicultural civil society.

An interdisciplinary invitation and gathering, this roundtable is a space for diasporic academics to reflect on how abolitionist theory and practice informs their scholarship and pedagogy, and how this political orientation is conducted and constrained within the neoliberal university.

Over the past twenty years, refugee studies has turned toward a critical encounter with the legal studies framework that had previously dominated it. Scholars such as those in the Critical Refugee Studies Collective have emphasized the position of refugee as one that creates new forms of relationship across spaces and times unbound (but not unmarked) by the state.

The seminar is interested in looking at papers that deal with the life of Dalits from a phenomenological perspective. The Dalit identity is not frigid. The politics of othering, the notion of subjectivity, the internationalization of caste, caste and cinema, music, art, and other mediums are areas that researchers can explore. Papers that are rooted in the local understanding of caste as a Global/ Indian problem are welcome. Responses that deal with ways to adapt the young generation to the thought of Ambedkar and propose ethical ways to deal with the question of caste are expected. Scholars from literature, political science, media studies, cultural studies, and aesthetics are welcome to make submissions.

philosophia naturalis
Making Sense of Relations and Realities

What is certain is that change is a perennial feature of our human experiences.  Yet, both imposed changes (aging, catastrophes, geopolitical change) and changes initiated by the individual for personal reasons (career, educational, family-based, among others). Is there a generalization of the notion of change?  In which ways is it possible to address the diversity of changes taking place in the immediacy of transformation?  This panel invites participants to engage in the concept of change applicable to diverse situations.  

What are the benefits and risks of change?

For close to seven hundred years, Gawain has been a favorite hero in Arthurian myth, especially when it comes to his legendary accomplishments—and faults—in Gawain and the Green Knight. No matter how much readers may root for him in his quest with the Green Knight, many of us can’t help but wonder…what if? All of that changed with David Lowery’s 2021 film, The Green Knight, which presents viewers with an abundance of scenarios that many of us haven’t even anticipated. In doing so, Lowery has forever altered the way scholars approach the medieval poem.

Call for Papers

 Edited Volume on Disney and the Middle Ages

We invite proposals for an edited collection of essays on medievalism in Disney media for Brepols’ new series Reinterpreting the Middle Ages: From Medieval to Neo. The Walt Disney Company's films, theme parks, and merchandise are full of people, places, and things coded as “medieval,” and because Disney's medievalism is often coded as white and Christian, it is especially relevant to medieval studies' ongoing struggle with white supremacy within and outside the field.

Call for Papers

Taylor Sheridan's Wests