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Ekphasis as Resistance: Empowering Marginalized Voices Through Art and Literature (roundtable)
Literary forms like the poems, novels, and short stories are often understood to be stand-ins for political resistance in critical theoretical debates especially since the dominance of post-al theories within literature departments. For literary forms emerging in the peripheries of the literary world system yoked by the global literary marketplace, the signification of resistance acts as a marker of value. This is superimposed on the idea of literary forms emerging from the peripheral locales of the literary world system that are read as derivative and mimetic of literary forms emerging from the core of the same system.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology | March 22-23, 2025 | Hybrid Format
In 2024, we are surrounded by crisis in nearly every sector of our world(s): environmental, political, social, cultural, and interpersonal. Crisis is not a new nor a unique phenomenon: Indigenous societies have faced decimation, war has torn through family and political associations, and environmental devastation cycles again and again.
The publication of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, in some ways, marked the end of New Criticism. The two approaches—structuralism and New Criticism—represent two ways of seeing texts as unities, yet produce entirely different views on key issues, such as how texts might be grouped together, the importance of historical context to the literary text, and the role of broader cultural systems in shaping a text’s meaning. We might wonder now whether or not these issues and ideas from New Criticism and structuralism, rooted in mid-20th century literary theory, continue to offer valuable insights and methodologies.
We are delighted to announce that the submissions deadline for paper, panel and roundtable proposals for the Conference “The Street and the City – Challenges”, taking place at the University of Lisbon (5-6 December 2024), has now been extended until 2nd October 2024.
Submissions to the conference are invited from a broad range of disciplines including literature, cultural studies, anthropology, history, politics, the social sciences, and other related disciplines.
We welcome proposals for papers, pre-organised panels and roundtables.
With the changing social realities alongside rapid innovation in science and technology, there is a sharp paradigm shift in academia in terms of research, especially in humanities. This shift can be considered a radical change in the core concepts. It is imperative to absorb the very meaning of paradigm shift. The term paradigm shift was coined by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in the context of revolutions in natural science. What is remarkable about Khun’s thought process is that in his book, Kuhn propounded the idea that theories have a social character and approaches them as social constructions that contain historical traces of the time and place in which they were generated.
The fields of medical and health humanities often aim to intervene in socially embedded systems of care and advance health justice. This roundtable explores ways to work toward that goal through pedagogy, research, and community partnership.
Steve Tomasula: The Art of Representation
June 12 and 13 2025, The University of Chicago in Paris, in the presence of the author
Keynote speakers: David Banash (Western Illinois University), Mary K. Holland (State University of New York, New Paltz)
Organized jointly by several institutions (Université Paris Cité, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Sorbonne Université, Université de Rennes, Université de Rouen, Université de Strasbourg), this is the first international conference devoted to the work of Steve Tomasula.
I'm writing to share the CFPs for the two Eudora Welty Society sessions that will be featured at the 2025 American Literature Association Conference in Boston at the Westin Copley Place (May 21-24, 2025). ******************** 1. Welty’s Sheltered Daring and Furtive FeminismEudora Welty concludes her literary autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings with the self-summation, “[a]s you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring comes from within” (104).
The way we imagine, represent, and signify the relations between empire and environment significantly shapes contemporary discourses on climate change, development, and globalization. Colonial and neoliberal legacies produce a “combined and uneven development” of the world system, resulting in hierarchies of metropolitan and peripheral relations. The elemental composition of environments (such as air, water, soil, and fire) in literary and cultural forms maps the intensification of these uneven relations under the capitalist mode of production. Jason Moore argues that the economy and environment are not independent of each other and posits that capitalism is a way of organizing nature (2015).
Call for Papers
Stardom and Fandom
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
46th Annual Conference, February 19-22, 2025
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2024
Conference online: 17-18 October 2024
Scientific Committee:
Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland
Dr. Ricardo Rato Rodrigues – Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Poland
CFP:
CFP: Continuity and Change in Media Representation
The Velvet Light Trap, Issue 96 (to be published Fall 2025)
Special Issue Theme
Since coalescing into a formal discipline in the 1970s, Translation Studies has both hinged upon and facilitated conversations about power. For better or for worse, the movement of a text from one form into another necessitates reflection upon hierarchy, periphery, and justice. From Spivak's native informant, to Chamberlain's feminist critiques of canonical translation theory, to Venuti's identification of translation as a seeking of utopia, analyses of the connection between (dis)empowerment and translation abound. However, what happens to and with translation when disempowered actors seek agency? How can translation be examined, utilized, and conceptualized when disempowerment demands revolution?
HENRY MILLER'S PLACE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
From 16-19 October of 2025, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal and the
Henry Miller MemorialLibrary will host aconference at Asilomar in Pacific Grove,
California, with an excursion to the Henry MillerMemorial Library in Big Sur. We will
examine Miller in light of contemporary thinking, asking the question: Is Henry
Miller relevant today?
Although presentations on any aspect of Miller's writing, artwork, and life are
welcomed, the conference organizers particularlyencourage consideration of the
theme of Miller's place in the 21st Century.
Topics for presentations might include, but are not limited to:
Migrant Institutions: The Impact of Postwar Newcomers on British Cultural Life
Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Monday, 9 December 2024
The Institute of English Studies invites proposals for a symposium exploring the impact of postwar migration on British cultural institutions. This one-day event will be held at Senate House, University of London on December 9th, 2024.
Speculative fiction creators regularly interrogate the question of who/what is entitled to human rights. As the created, grown, augmented, and manufactured beings of imagination become more sentient, is it ethical to maintain them as labor-saving devices or will they start to become entitled to, or even demand, rights? Is there a Posthuman Rights Movement in our future or a post “human rights” movement? How will this movement accommodate already-existing arguments for the rights of non-human beings, such as the rights of animals, corporations, and even fetuses, while accounting for humans who are not entitled to human rights? Does one need a human-ish form to deserve rights including around one’s labor?
Toxic Exposure: Chemicals in Contemporary Global Fiction
Weeks after the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro this year, her daughter Andrea Skinner disclosed the longstanding sexual abuse she'd suffered as a child at the hands of her stepfather, Munro’s husband, Gerald Fremlin—abuse about which Munro had known and stayed silent. The disclosure is but the latest revelation to throw into question the legacy of a revered cultural icon. Neil Gaiman, Louis CK, Jean Vanier, and Avital Ronell are only a few public figures to be reassessed in recent years in the wake of accounts of sexual abuse.
The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a session at the annual American Literature Association Conference, to be held in Boston, May 21-24. We are interested in abstracts that examine the influence of Charles Olson and/or other Black Mountain Poets on poetic practices and on subsequent generations of poets. A variety of poets took up the innovative ideas of figures like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, Ed Dorn and others associated with Black Mountain. How have the practices of this fundamentally important school of poetics been extended, transformed, and/or resisted by poets from subsequent generations?
Call for Papers: Journal of Contemporary Painting
Special Issue: ‘The Curatorial and Painting’, Issue 12.1
Journal of Contemporary Painting invites submissions for issue 12.1 (to be published in April 2026) on the theme ‘The Curatorial and Painting’.
For the issue of JCP ‘The Curatorial and Painting’, we want to explore the contexts made for painting to be shown and painting’s impact on those contexts. We are interested in two ways of understanding an exchange between painting and the curatorial: through spatial/durational dimensions and through social practices.
Potential themes include:
What is an Internet-based conference without addressing the Internet’s favorite topic: cats!? This panel seeks papers interested in exploring eighteenth-century cats in their many facets and figurations. Cats abound during this period: from big cats in the natural histories, moralizing cats in fables and children’s stories, mysterious and symbolic cats in the art of Fragonard or Chardin, to real-life cats in the lives of Samuel Johnson or Horace Walpole.
The roundtable addresses the field of 18th-century-centered digital humanities and digitization projects through the lens of labor, service, and alt-ac career prospects. Extending out of previous ASECS panels on Transkribus-a-thons, challenges in digitization, and collaborative work in DH, this roundtable proposes to focus more closely on these issues in specifically graduate and early career contexts, to ask questions such as “What are the skills required for digitization projects?” and “Do networking/alt-ac skills building opportunities in digitization outweigh the labor demands?
2024-2025 Illinois Medieval Association Symposium
November 8, 2024
Online and completely free
Submission Deadline: October 15
The Illinois Medieval Association is now accepting proposals for our annual Halloween session: Medieval Monstrosities. This session is part of our annual Symposium, which runs online throughout the year. Topics are open to any work being done on the monstrous, supernatural, strange, and/or bizarre. The session will be free and online, and papers presented at the session are eligible for submission to Essays in Medieval Studies, IMA's annual proceedings volume.
Firebrand Burns On!
Conference to Celebrate Firebrand Books
Ithaca College
April 18-19, 2025
From 1984 to 2000 editor Nancy Bereano working out of a tiny office in Ithaca, New York published 104 books, including some of the most influential LGBTQIA+ titles ever produced. This two-day conference celebrates the achievements and legacy of Firebrand Books. For a complete overview of Firebrand publications see https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM07670.html. We invite papers on a variety of topics:
Discussions of the work of Firebrand authors, including:
In the last few years, increasing recourse to ever more efficient technologies and artificial intelligence has radically changed the interpreting and translating professions, triggering an evolution process whose outcomes are currently difficult to predict, but what is certain is that translators and interpreters have to do their best to respond to the changing requirements of a highly diversified market.
This panel seeks proposals to approach Romanticism as a (r)evolutionary mode of thinking. We invite abstracts to revolutionize and de-border the conventional Eurocentric Romantic boundaries in genres, forms, styles, themes, cultural legacies, and critical methods. Proposals are invited to transcend Romanticism of the Romantic Era to a new timeless global Romanticism of both historicity and modernity that contributes to ideological diversity. From the old pan-European Romanticism to a new international Romanticism, reading Romantic Literature as World Literature, this panel welcomes new creative approaches to interpret works by the Romantics.
Eighteenth-Century Cats! [ID 68]
Chair: Taylin Nelson, ASECS Graduate and Early Career Caucus, Rice University, tpn2@rice.edu
Weekend: March 28/29
What is an Internet-based conference without addressing the Internet’s favorite topic: cats!? This panel seeks papers interested in exploring eighteenth-century cats in their many facets and figurations. Cats abound during this period: from big cats in the natural histories, moralizing cats in fables and children’s stories, mysterious and symbolic cats in the art of Fragonard or Chardin, to real-life cats in the lives of Samuel Johnson or Horace Walpole.
Modern Language Studies, the journal of the Northeast Modern Language Association, is seeking reviews for the summer 2025 issue. In recent years, the temperature has risen around free speech debates, and books on censorship and free speech come out with such frequency that it is hard to keep abreast of the new scholarship. I am interested in receiving reviews and review essays on academic books published in the last several years that are in some way related to free speech. The books to be reviewed can center on any historical, geographical, or disciplinary context, and the reviews and review essays can be written from (almost) any theoretical perspective.
Call for Papers
New Volume: Remembering and (Re)remembering Social Justice in the 21st Century
Publisher: FACET
Please Submit a 500 word Abstract by October 20.
Ben Alexander: Bea3@columbia.edu
We are looking for 3, maybe 4, chapters to complete our volume that is in-contract with FACET. Verne Harris will be authoring our Forward, Trudy Peterson our Introduction and Verne Harris our Afterword. Chapter titles include: