Please come join us at the American Literature Association Conference in Boston, MA, from July 7-11, 2021 where the Kurt Vonnegut Society will hold two academic sessions and host a business meeting. The ALA has made accommodations for distant-presentation, so we welcome those who may only appear digitally.

Here’s the Call for Papers.  Proposals are due by February 1, 2021.  Since the ALA has pushed the conference back to July, we have extended the deadline for proposals to February 20, 2021.

Panel 1:  Vonnegut and Religion

118th Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Las Vegas and Online (Thursday, November 11 to Sunday, November 14, 2021) 

For a special double issue to be published in March, 2022. 

Papers addressing the plurality of religious cultures in the nineteenth century, including not only Catholicism, Anglicanism, Protestantism, and Judaism, but also Buddhism, Hermeticism,  Native American Religions, Theosophy, Unitarianism, the LDS Church, African-American religion, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, Shakerism, etc., competing and overlapping in nineteenth-century contexts. Papers are welcome in all the arts; incuding literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, liturgy, the textile arts, the decorative arts, music, and dance. 

Illustrations, both color and black-and-white, are encouraged. 

The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, a peer-reviewed academic journal edited by graduate students at the University of Iowa and dedicated to publishing cultural studies scholarship from both established and emerging scholars, is currently soliciting book reviews for our upcoming issue: Justice Framed. Reviewers must be post-comprehensive exam scholars, and reviews must not be previously published elsewhere. The deadline for reviews is April 1, 2021.

We are particularly interested in reviews of the following texts:

Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America by Brigitte Fielder (Duke University Press, 2020)

2020 marks the centennial celebration of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise. Because a centennial is also a time to look back in order to reevaluate, reassess and then speculate on the future, we invite scholars to explore and analyze not only the lasting significance of Fitzgerald's oeuvre, but also the many possible parallels and/or tensions between his work and that of other writers and artists. Essays that turn to new perspectives and expand upon connections between Fitzgerald’s work and other literary and artistic expressions are also especially welcome.

Topics may include (but are not limited) to:

I'm seeking abstracts of 250 words due March 7, 2021 for an edited collection under contract with an academic publisher entitled "Women Writing Trauma in Literature."  The book considers literary representations of trauma by women writers. Rather than focusing on one time period or nationality, this collection considers a global range of women’s experiences with or depictions of traumatic encounters in literature. In particular, this book examines the relationship between trauma, identity, and literary form. Send abstracts to laura.leigh.alexander@gmail.com. Notification of accepted essays by April 1, 2021. Completed chapters (4000-6000 words) due by July 2021. 

Our website: https://www.postmemory.info/

Scientific Committee:

Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland

Professor Polina Golovátina-Mora - Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Colombia)

​We are happy to announce that the KEYNOTE SPEAKERS at our 2nd "Postmemory and the Contemporary World", 25-26 February 2021 will be Marianne Hirsch and Mirta Kupferminc.

 CFP:

"Crossroads: The Risks of Making Choices"

Virtural Conference: April 16th-17th

"Each decision we make closes off a series of possible alternatives. What happens if we try to make several contradictory decisions at once and keep them separate, in open series? A political life, an academic life, an emotional life, family life, sexual, religious, all of which may have diffuse (not to say clandestine) relationships between them" Ricardo Piglia, The Way Out (258)       

Cornell EGSO 2021 Conference: Vulnerability

DEADLINE EXTENDED: February 15, 2021

Virtual Conference April 16th - 17th, 2021 

Call For Proposals:

Call For Papers – ReFocus: The Films of David Mamet

We are seeking abstracts of 250-500 words for essays to be included in a book-length anthology on David Mamet to appear in late 2022. We have received a number of strong proposals already, but looking for a few more to add to the volume’s lineup. The intended scope of the work is to analyze Mamet’s unique position as an artist of note in both the theatre and the cinema, as well as his very specific ideas about dramatic structure, performance style, and economical visual storytelling. It will argue, for the first time, that Mamet’s film work is an essential, but underappreciated dimension of his artistic career.

The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies is a fully open access peer-reviewed publication edited by graduate students at The University of Iowa that mixes traditional approaches and contemporary interventions in the interdisciplinary humanities and interpretive social sciences. This year’s issue will challenge and facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship through an inquiry into  frames of justice. 

Anachronism has long been the third rail of medieval studies—or, to quote Lucien Febvre, “the worst of all sins, the sin that cannot be forgiven.” Medievalists want to get our period “right,” which has often meant understanding it in relation to “euchronic” evidence. The intolerance of anachronism is, however, in conflict with medieval literary aesthetics, which often troubles differences between past and present. It is also at odds with recent developments in adjacent fields.

Special Session, MLA (Modern Language Association) 2022

Location/Dates: Washington DC, 6-9th January, 2022

Deadline for submissions: March 5, 2021

Organization: Children's Literature Division, MLA

Contact email: mgreenb6@uwo.ca

In the opening preface to the New York Edition of his fiction, James famously wrote: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so. . . . The prime effect of so sustained a system, so prepared a surface, is to lead on and on; while the fascination of following resides, by the same token, in the presumability somewhere of a convenient, of a visibly-appointed stopping-place.”

James’s problem of the artist is also the problem of scholarship: Finding a “convenient . . . stopping-place” that also leads readers “on and on” in their own work and thinking too.