Seeking contributors for a 3-4 person panel on "Plague Years: Pandemic and Pestilence in the Long Eighteenth Century."

(une version française suivra)

"Narratives of Catastrophe"

Newspaper headlines of recent years, detailing extreme weather events, the rising spectres of authoritarian movements and the surveillance state, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, describe conditions uncomfortably similar to those typically found in the dystopian novel. As one bookstore in Smalltown Canada put it, “the Apocalyptic Fiction section has now been moved to Current Affairs.” 

The editor of a volume tentatively titled Redefining Paradise is looking for submissions focusing on 21st-century, environmentally oriented fiction written in California and the American West.

CALL FOR PAPERS!
FRAME 35.1, “Literary Perspectives on Food”

FRAME’s next issue is titled “Literary Perspectives on Food” and accordingly focuses on the intersection between literature and food studies. We would like to invite scholars of literature and related fields to investigate and (re)consider the relation between food and literature, and food as a medium for knowledge production. Among other things, the following questions might guide thinking about the relationship between food and literature:

The poet's lyric "I" is perhaps the locus classicus for depictions of interiority, or what it feels like to inhabit a particular psyche, to experience a particular consciousness, but this roundtable will examine such depictions in American fiction. Authors might include Jonathan Bayliss, Annie Dillard, Henry James, Jack Kerouac, Ralph Ellison, Kathy Acker, Henry Miller, William Faulkner, or others. 

The Jonathan Bayliss Society invites proposals of no more than 200 words, along with a brief bio, for consideration for a roundtable at the American Literature Association, May 26-29, 2022, Chicago. Please send proposals to Gary Grieve-Carlson at grieveca@lvc.edu by January 25, 2022.

We are welcoming submissions for the seminar Je est un author: (Re-)Appearances of the Authorial Subject in Literature and Theory, which we are planning for the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in Taipei, Taiwan, June 15-18, 2022.

In Mithu Sanyal’s novel Identitti, shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2021, a fictional professor of Postcolonial Studies who identifies as a PoC causes a scandal when it turns out she is actually white – a premise resembling a recent case in American academia. Who is ‘behind’ a theory matters – but how?

Two-day international conference, 23rd to 24th May 2022 to be held in person at Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK and online

Keynotes: To be confirmed

Convenors:

Dr James Fenwick (j.fenwick@shu.ac.uk Sheffield Hallam University)

Dr Kieran Foster (Kieran.foster@nottingham.ac.uk University of Nottingham)

Call for Proposals: Film History Book Series

We are seeking proposals for complete/in-progress/planned manuscripts and edited collections for a proposed book series. The series will focus on film history: both the history of film as media texts and the history/evolution of the cinematic apparatus. 

RIT press has expressed interest in this series and has asked that we secure some projects before moving forward with approval.  

Potential topics include but are not limited to: 

CFP: FSAC Grad Colloquium, Co-Hosted by Utoronto/York (February 18-19 2022) 

The following is a Call for Papers for the 24th Annual Film Studies Association of Canada Graduate Colloquium, co-hosted by the University of Toronto and York University, to take place online on 18/19 February 2022. Submission guidelines are outlined below.

CFP: Altered States

Nothing exists that doesn’t have this senseless sense – common to flames, dreams, uncontrollable laughter – in those moments when consumption accelerates, beyond the desire to endure.

- Georges Bataille, The Impossible

“A is for Activist” is the title of a best-selling children’s board book, published in 2013 by Innosanto Nagara. This small book amplifies a large message: books can catalyze change. Publishing has both supported and hampered progressive political and social change, in a variety of international contexts. Activism in publishing is also transnational because national contexts and identities matter, but they exist within a transnational network with unequal power dynamics and “literary capital” (Casanova 2004). Building on ideas of “print activism” in the long twentieth century (Schreiber 2013), this special issue is dedicated to furthering our understanding of activism in the contemporary publishing industry – and in the research thereof.

Biola University

La Mirada, CA

April 7–9, 2022

“All theology is rooted in geography.”

—Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant: an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

Deadline for abstracts: 1 December 2021

Deadline for essays: 1 May 2022

California has been transnational since the moment of colonial encounter from which it acquired its name – borrowed by Spanish explorers from a work of contemporary fiction and imposed upon a place (indeed, multiple places) long known to indigenous peoples by other words. Since that time, California has been defined by further transnational encounters, exchanges, and conflicts – as a site of cross-cultural communication where borders often characterise experience but equally often prove to be porous and mutable.

Despite a wealth of historical research on Liberia – a country founded by black U.S.settlers brought to West Africa in the 1820s, under the auspices of the American Colonization Society (ACS) – Liberian English and Anglophone Liberian literature remain under-researched.

This seminar session at the ESSE 2022 Conference in Mainz, Germany (August 29-September 2, 2022 - https://esse2022.uni-mainz.de/) aims to provide an interdisciplinary forum for authors, linguists, and literary scholars working on Liberia (incl. the country’s transnational connections).

Three key aims are:

As of March 2021, a year after the United States first entered nation-wide lockdowns in response to the global spread of COVID-19, the National Center for Health Statistics reported a 30% increase in drug overdose deaths across the country. Antidepressant, anti-anxiety, and insomnia prescriptions have also hit record highs. Now public health bodies are embarking on the most ambitious vaccination campaign in US history. Living through the chronic sequelae of these interlocking (and still unfolding) crises is bearable only by recourse to a pharmaceutical fix.